Other comics we (my brother and I, at least) read included
Pogo and Mad magazine. It wasn’t
until years later that I learned we may have been reading Mad from its
inception in 1952. When you’re a kid and you find a new comic or magazine, it
doesn’t occur to you that it never existed before.
Mad was obviously subversive, making fun
of everything in sight. Was it the take-offs on TV shows that made them silly,
or sillier? Was there political satire I might, or might not, have noticed?
Being the child of semi-closeted lefties, I already knew not to believe
everything I saw on TV; I wasn’t reading newspapers much until I was a senior
in high school.
But how did
we know Pogo was subversive? Was it the reworking of Christmas carols (“Deck us
all with Boston Charley,/ walla-walla-wash and kalamazoo/Nora’s freezing on the
trolley/Swaller dollar cauliflower, alley-garoo”)? Was it the recurring
character protesting, “Destroy a son’s faith in his father?”
Once I left
home, I probably kept up with the comics in the Washington Post the two years I lived in that city. And we read the
few comics that were in the New York Post
once Jack started working there, and continued to get the Sunday Daily News for our full fix until the
1990 strike at that paper, when we got out of the habit and never went back.
As an
editor at the now defunct publisher Bobbs-Merrill, I was happy to include
comics in Pepper Schwartz and Janet Lever’s 1971 book about the early years of
women being accepted as students at Yale, Women
at Yale: Liberating a College Campus. They suggested we use comics from
then-student Garry Trudeau. Working at the Village Voice, I got to copy edit
the comics of Jules Feiffer, Stan Mack, Mark Stamaty, Matt Groening, Lynda
Barry—just to make sure their words were spelled correctly, nothing more.
But I
wasn’t a big fan of comix or zines. The misogyny of the drawings of
women had become repugnant rather than an element to be overlooked. But didn’t
Dykes to Watch Out For run in Ms. magazine? I know I read that comic. And there
were lots of feminist political illustrations that I think of as “comics,” like
the famous on of two women walking down a staircase in the background, while one of
their dates waits nervously; the overline: “Careful, honey, he’s anti-choice.”
Of
course, I read the graphic “novels” Maus,
in 1986; Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year,
in 1995; and Persepolis, in 2003. Why
of course—because these comics had literary claims? Many of these new graphic
“novels” were personal, which seems especially suitable to the combination of
illustration and text. Maus’s
subject, the Holocaust, lent its gravity to the format. The image of young
Iranian girls turning their hijabs into horse reins or robber masks in Persepolis demonstrated a perhaps
unconscious subversion. Graphic novels are now an established form of
literature, comics grownup.
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