Essay #2: Letters 2, Keeping in Touch with Comics, 1

In my second week at Antioch College, October 4, 1960, I wrote to my brother, showing off my dissipated life. After the Josh White concert (see last week’s essay),

“some boys from Siwannee, one of the better boys dorms asked us to a party. It was really dead. One fellow was drinking beer out of a mug, and every time he opened a new can it dripped all over the floor. The other one kept talking about the importance of comic strips and how you shouldn’t let yourself get out of touch with that is going on in the world of funnies.”

            This is one of those scenes I have no recollection of. I don’t remember the name of that boy, so no way to learn whether he ended up in the comics field, either as writer, artist, or critic. From my dismissive tone—the party was “really dead”—I must have thought “the funnies” were childish fare not worth the attention of a college student.

            But I liked “the funnies.” Our Philadelphia newspaper had, I think, two pages of comic strips ranging from Dennis the Menace to Prince Valiant. And my interest in reading comics goes way back to early childhood.

            I still have a battered (and much marked up) copy of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (Blue Ribbon Books, 1943), a collection of the cartoon that ran in the left-wing New York newspaper PM. During World War II, a small boy named Barnaby wishes for a beautiful fairy godmother, and instead, one night, a cigar-smoking, fat little fairy godfather with pink wings flies in his window. Naturally, his parents try to convince him that Mr. O’Malley is only a dream, but stranger and stranger things begin to occur. For instance, an old abandoned house in the neighborhood is believed to be haunted. Mr. O’Malley’s attempts to rid the house of “fiends” accidentally uncovers a gang hijacking trucks carrying bags of coffee and hiding them in the haunted house—and the parents and police all believe Barnaby and his friend Jane are the heroes for uncovering the thieves. I read this book multiple times, colored in some of the drawings, wrote comments in the margins.

            The barbershop on our block of 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst discarded out-of-date comic books in a box outside the shop, and neighborhood kids would sit on the sidewalk reading them. There were Classic Comics (classic stories like Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Christo told in comic book format), Blackhawk (a World War II comic with a crew of pilots from central casting, as well as stereotypical Japanese enemies), and Superman. Our mother didn’t care if we read comic books; any kind of reading was reading, and was good.

            The newspaper comics I remember most were the “soap operas”: Mary Worth, Brenda Starr, Mark Trail. I also read Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon, Dondi, as well as Peanuts, Archie, Lulu, Nancy, and Pogo. There are surely others, but I don’t remember whether any of the superheroes were syndicated in the newspapers in West Haven and Philadelphia suburbs where I lived through the 1950s.

(to be continued)