Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
On Being a Historian/Advocate
for the
Silver Age of
Comics; Carrying the Lighted Torch To the Back of the Cave; and the Self-Destructive
Cargo Cult of Modern Comics Fandom.
Yes. I'm Afraid It's Another One of Those Rants. 
(Part Four)
We've just about finished a-whuppin' on this here spavined and sway-backed intellectual
horsey.
"Why should I care if some little twerps out there can't understand any issue of the average comic book? If they need to be 'talked down' to, then that's their problem! I do NOT want to see ANY comics I currently read and collect become 'all ages' titles! And I refuse to apologize for wanting comic books to grow up, just as I did! Why should the loyal, long-time readers have to put up with 'baby talk' in THEIR fiction?!?"
Let's take a closer gander at those final two sentences, shall we...?
D.) "And I refuse to apologize for wanting comic books to grow up, just as I did!"
There is a scheme of things, in the natural world.
Cute, cuddly little kittens grow up, eventually, to become sleek, self-sufficient felines.
Panting and adorable puppies achieve maturity, sooner or later, as full-grown canines.
... and -- with the sole, scientifically inexpllicable exceptions of American presidents; professional country-and-western line dancers; and a peculiarly grudging and obstructionist faction within the rank-and-file of today's mainstream comics fandom -- children (sooner or later) morph, over a period of years, into honest-to-goodness adults.
As nature has provided (and as Man has maintained it), this cunningly arranged natural order makes allowances for the widely disparate physical; mental; emotional; and societal needs of the fully adult... and of the child.
One of the things from which a child may most benefit -- and from which they may garner, likewise, the most enlightenment and enjoyment -- is the fully-blown, larger-than-life grandeur inherent in the world of the mythic.
Grand, sweeping epics of near-gods and almost-devils. Clearly and cleanly delineated sagas of Incorruptible Good, standing athwart of (and in eternal opposition against) the assembled armies of Darkness and Chaos. These have been regarded as the sole province(s) -- and rightly so, I might add -- of those young and (comparatively) iinexperienced readers for whom more subtle and/or rigorous fictions would prove either: a.) inappropriate, or else: b.) impenetrable, outright.
(No reasonably sane individual would argue, I'd venture, that an eight- year-old, for instance, should be forced to wade his [or her] way through Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE -- or the collected writings of Hunter S. Thompson -- in place of the more traditional offerings of Barrie, or Milne, on the rhetorical grounds that "... fiction is for adults; why should the loyal, long-time readers of books be forced to put up with 'baby talk,' anyway...?"
(This is, of course, chiefly attributable to the universally-recognized [and
decidedly rational] notion that Not All Things Which Adults Enjoy Are
Good -- Or Even Appropriate -- To the Needs of the Very Young... along
with the concomitantly sound assumption that Kids Deserve To Be Enlightened
and Entertained Every Last Bit As Much As Do Adults. And Maybe Even a
Little Bit More So, Come To Think.)
.
A child's first wide-eyed and joyous introduction to the world of Greco-Roman mythology -- whether courtesy of Bullfinch; Hamillton; or whomever you please -- is one of those traditional rites of passage along the fictive footpaths. The safe-as-houses shenanigans of Halloween -- with its vampires and goblins, and the temporary assumption of a darker, alternate identity (shades of Joseph Campbell!) -- is yet another.
... and -- until they'd been crudely yanked >away from those for whose benefits they'd always been tailored and intended -- so, too, were the life-affirming nostrums of the mainstream super-hero tale.
None of this (patently) is to suggest that these entertainments -- any of them -- may not be, similarly, appreciated and esteemed by adults, in equal measure. To intuit otherwise from any of the foregoing -- I state it here and now, in language manifest and plain -- would be as calculatedly false an argument as it would be an (ultimately) nonsensical one.
It is, however, a bedrock assertion that for those selfsame "adults" to snatch away one of the few remaining avenues by means of which children may, ultimately, decode and assimilate such eternal verities as "Truth and Justice"; "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"; and "No Evil Shall Escape My Sight" (among others), is as mean, grasping and selfish an action as anything ever cobbled up by the standard spandexed comic book super-villain.
No: no one need ever "apologize for wanting comic books to grow up, just as I did!" The innate, all-but-inarticulate yearning to hold fast the joys of our childhood is a pardonable one, certainly; one to which every man and woman, at one time or another, eventually succumbs.
The desire
(and complicity inherent therein) to body snatch the corpus of comic
books away from children outright and entire, on the other hand...?
Yeah.
In all honesty... yeah. That one, you really do need to "apologize" for; to whichever extent you (or you, or you, or even you) may be personally complicit.
Not that there isn't an adequate amount of blame to decently spread around, mind you. Your humble narrator included.
It wasn't so very many years ago (as these things inevitably go) that I was one of those "all right, you little pissant squirts! Drop those comic books and back away -- SLOWLY!" types, my own (way, waaaay) post- adolescent self.
Eventually, however: after watching the medium I've loved for more years than I can count, without getting all mopey about it, spiral its way in an economic freefall of such epic proportions that it's very nearly taken on the quasi-biblical aspects of A Judgement From God Almighty...
... I finally decided to take a step or two back... and be an adult
about all of this.
Perhaps it's simply -- in the final analysis -- the peculiar sort of clarity afforded one who's willingly shouldered the responsibilities (and the joys attendant thereto) of parenthood... and of watching one's own children struggle their respective ways along life's bramble paths.
... or: perhaps it was simply all those years, more than a decade agone, I spent shepherding my own retail comics shop; and of watching as my own clientele (and those of every other shop owner) greyed and grew ever more sulky and obstinate, re: the notion that -- gee whillikers! -- maybe there is/was something inherently ridiculous in the fanboyish article of faith (so dearly beloved; and so dearly surrendered, in turn) positing that "comic books are better than ever, consarn it!"... while the industry, in the meantime, grew so palsied and enfeebled, it now languishes somewhere in the borderlands betwixt Comatose and Singing With the Bleeding Choir Invisible.
I don't honestly know, truth to tell.
I do know this much, however:
Those long-ago spinner racks, in drug stores and gas stations throughout the country entire, used to bear the large, friendly and affirming legend: "Hey, Kids! COMICS!"
Those three words -- arranged in precisely that order -- hold in their near-talismanic power a larger, more joyous promise of rapture and revealed wonderment than all of the WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS ever conceived of... now, or in the future.
I'm just sayin', is all.
"Shouting At the Loons": PAGE ONE
"Shouting At the Loons": PAGE TWO
"Shouting At the Loons": PAGE THREE
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