Wild About Writing

Wow! Holy Moly and all that stuff — Disney pays four billion dollars to buy up Marvel Entertainment. The guys at CBR News — the Comic Books Resources site — quote a range of reaction, most of its favorable.

The merger will give Disney a much-needed array of new characters and product lines that have strong appeal for young males. Heroes like Captain America and The Punisher will now be available for starring roles in Disney movies.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the cultural impact that comics have on boys and girls in practically every country. The range of creativity is so wide that there’s something for every one — be it Archie Comics for girls (mostly) or the Marvel characters that seem to appeal most strongly to boys.

The news got me to reminiscing about the comics I read as a boy. I was a big comics reader — both of the Sunday color comics that ran in Saturday papers in Canada, and comic books that we lined up in the drug store to buy at a dime apiece.

Reading the comics taught me a lot about life:

• Bringing Up Father, the color comic about Maggie and Jiggs, taught me that men went to work in offices where they wore suits and ties and smoked a lot.  My Dad explained we didn’t have offices in the small B.C. town where we lived. At about the age of 5, I gathered up the wooden chairs in our kitchen, arranged them in what I thought was a proper office set-up, and stuck my forefinger in my mouth to simulate smoking a cigarette. The comic gave me an image of a larger, more exciting world.
• Flash Gordon in the 25th Century. A wonderful science fiction adventure comic that pitted Flash and his girlfriend Dale Arden against their kidnapper Dr. Zarkov whose rocket ship crash lands them on the planet Mongo.  The comic hinted at a fantastically different world in which we’d someday live. I think it made it easier for me to accept the incredible changes that have unfolded in our lifetimes. I’ve never feared change. Instead, I’ve welcomed it.
• Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur. Beautifully drawn, with a wonderfully romantic narrative, this comic gave me a love of history I’ve never lost. Prince Valiant became a leading property of King Features, the big comic syndicate. Today’s web site describes it as “a historical novel in serialized form, one in which characters have more than two dimensions — the virtuous have flaws and the villainous are frequently not without some small virtue.”

Maybe it’s because my comic book reading days are long gone, but I can’t see today’s comics delivering similar lessons of life to their young readers.

Sure, the heroes always triumph and the villains always get theirs. But life’s not that simple. Most of the Marvel characters are so fantastical that I don’t see their relevance to the lives of their young readers.

Good literature informs, entertains and challenges. The comics I used to read — and the books I most admire — all possess those characteristics. The rest is all just mindless escape — like most of what’s on TV and in the movies these days.