Thursday, April 16, 1998
Superheros saved the day … and my life
COMICS: Collectables offer escape from reality of life, aren’t
just for kids
"Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive.
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look, up in the sky
– it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!"
Each episode of the old "Adventures of Superman" television
show, the one starring George Reeves, started with this famous
quote and marks what is so special about the most widely recognized
superhero on the planet: Superman, the Man of Steel.
The man who can bend steel with his bare hands has appeared on
television, animation, movies and video games, taking the mass
media engines by storm. But it cannot be forgotten where he came
from and where he is most recognized: my favorite thing to collect
– the comic book.
OK, I know what you’re thinking. How old am I again? Silly
rabbit, comic books are just for kids, right? The impression that I
am simply too old to be reading comic books is one that I encounter
often when I publicly express my favorite (and most expensive)
pastime. But this childish stereotype couldn’t be further from the
truth.
In reality, the average comic book reader is in his mid-20s and
financially able to support a similar purchasing budget to my own –
currently between $10 and $20 per week.
Comic book readers are a largely committed bunch, despite
popular opinion that we are a bunch of blathering simpletons. The
comic book requires active participation on the part of the reader
(you have to look at the pictures and read the words, much as in
magazines and books), while retaining the continuous and serial
nature of television’s most successful shows (like sitcoms and soap
operas. In that light, comic book readers can hardly be seen as
intellectually lacking; they don’t miss an episode simply because
it requires more work on their part to understand.)
Another interesting aspect of the comic book audience is that
they are a group with a larger reservoir of storytelling available
to them than just the written word. For comic readers, the art is
just as important – if not more important than – what they find in
the word balloons.
Since comic books are oriented around action sequences, it’s
important that the artwork have a smooth and natural feel to it,
while trying to stay as close to realism as possible (about as
close to real as a guy flying around in tights and beaming heat
rays from his eyes can be, but you know what I mean), without
losing that extraordinary sense of neo-animation that comics have
made famous. (For example, when Clark Kent rips open his suit to
reveal an "S" behind it, the scene is usually exaggerated to
emphasize that Superman is here to save the day.) While all comic
book artists have unique and very telling styles, the most
successful ones are those that work within the above
parameters.
Another important aspect that comic readers share is inherent to
the medium itself: escapism. We all experience it – after a long
day of classes or work, when we feel like we can’t get enough sleep
to recuperate from the trials we’ve just experienced, we come home,
put our feet up and play some music or watch some television.
Reading comic books is not especially different in this regard.
Most take a period of 20 minutes to read and upon completion, the
reader is left feeling fulfilled and relieved. Especially uplifting
are the comic books that follow the tried-but-true formula of a
larger-than-life hero conquering an impossible evil and ending the
day with the very human conventions that we can all relate to, such
as sleeping or eating, or meeting their spouses.
This is all well and good, you might be saying, but what does
this have to do with me? Well, I really can’t answer that since
your own personal tastes (and as I have alluded to previously,
common stereotypes) may prevent you from ever picking up a comic
book in your lifetime. So while I can’t tell you what comics can do
for you, I’ll do the next best thing and explain what they have
done for me.
At the ripe old age of 14, I was a freshman in high school and
not particularly interested in anything that took more than two
seconds’ time to attend to. My parents always whispered about how
worried they were since I would sit in front of the television set
for hours on end without gleaning one ounce of useful information
from it. I had the attention span of a flashlight and my parents
were not too happy about it.
"Gain outside interests," they told me. My father suggested
basketball or football, an activity all teenage boys were very
interested in.
"Dad," I explained, "I was born deficient of the sports
gene."
"OK," my mom tried, "so why not go with a friend to see this
movie?"
"Mo-o-om," I moaned, "Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs
down."
So the situation seemed hopeless. However, a silver lining
appeared when my father opened up the newspaper soon afterwards and
reported nonchalantly (after winking at my mom) that Superman was
going to be killed. After commenting on what a slow news day it
must have been, I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I didn’t
care.
When Mom suggested I start collecting comics I gave her that,
"What am I, 5?" look that she knew so well. But when my dad
reported that the issue in which the Man of Steel would be sent to
that great comic book store in the sky would probably be worth
quite a substantial amount of money, my ears perked up. After all,
if there was one thing I liked better than doing nothing, it was
having a whole slew of money at the same time.
So the next day, my mother brought home a package of 15 comic
books from the Price Club, with the pivotal death issue inside of
it.
I started reading the issues that had come with the Death comic:
there was a Flash, a Green Lantern, a couple Batmans and four
Supermans (which consisted of the issues leading up to his death
and those right afterward). And I absolutely adored them. Here was
a piece of modern folklore, I thought, on the level of the
"Odyssey" and the "Iliad," things I had only read about in
school.
Sure, comics got a bad rap, but it was only because people
prejudged them by their childish stereotype, without once taking a
look inside to discover the magic that lay within.
As it happened, I soon found out (after quite a few weeks of
going to my neighborhood comics shop to follow up on the issues
that had come with the Price Club package) that the Death issues I
possessed were fourth printings (meaning that three separate
printings of the damn things had already sold out) and were
collectively worth less than a pack of gum.
And you know what? I didn’t care. The experience of reading the
comic books – losing myself in that vast world and forgetting my
problems for even a moment – was worth more than any monetary value
the books could have had, even if I had gotten the vaunted first
printings.
The moral of the story? Comic books are more important than
money. Wait a minute …