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The Comicbook Revolution

Loser boys and girls (aka the ones who grow up to be writers) in America have always had something, some pop-culture force, to act as a sort of generational unifier. Something that swirled around their tiny prepubescent heads, something they only partly understood, but they were in awe of it. It was epic and revolutionary, like most things unknown. In the 1930s, it was jazz culture and poverty. Children knew they were poor, felt the ramifications of being poor, but still didn't really understand it. In the 40s, it was the war. In the 50s it was the mythology of the Atomic Age--bomb shelters, mutants, the evil USSR. In the 60s, it was rock and roll. In the 70s and onward it was hip hop, punk, and more importantly for what I'm writing here, comicbooks.

Yeah, the loser boys and girls (but, let's face it, mostly boys) had comicbooks as their cultural revolution. Now, compared to World War II and the atomic bomb, comicbooks don't seem like a very powerful force. But to a child who doesn't even understand the world beyond the boundaries of his city block, the universes of Marvel and DC are just as real as Europe and Asia and the word "thermonuclear." Granted, children from the 30s onward had comicbooks. But the cultural significance wasn't yet understood. Kids who read comicbooks back then and became writers themselves--we can really only judge a society based on what's written about it--either a) wrote comicbooks or b) wrote books that had nothing to with comics--comics were simply another folly of childhood to be forgotten.

It wasn't until recently--when the children of the 70s and 80s grew up--that the significance of comicbooks was really understood, their place in society acknowledged. It is from comicbooks that these children learned about morality. From Superman they learned that it was tough to always be truthful and good when faced with evil and opposition, but that it was right in the end to stand your ground. From Spider-Man they learned that "with great power comes great responsibility." From the X-Men they learned that kids like them--dorks, outcasts, misfits--can change the world. From the Fantastic Four they learned that it's sometimes tough to be in a family, and that family doesn't only mean your relatives. And this is just scratching the surface. Our friend Andy Morrison wrote a great essay on all of this, I'll try to get it from him to add it here. It's funny--and very insightful on his part--that Andy wrote this essay at this time, because it's only in the last couple of years that all of this has truly come to light, that comics have become legit as an extremely important cultural phenomenon.

In 1994 Rick Moody wrote The Ice Storm. In that book one of the main characters, the son Paul, compares his family to the Fantastic Four. He knows the comparison isn't entirely accurate. Sometimes his dad is Reed Richards, brilliant but emotionally unavailable, sometimes he's The Thing, dimwitted but caring. Sometimes his mom is Sue Storm, The Invisible Woman, sometimes she isn't and he wishes she was. Sometimes his sister is The Invisible Woman. What's important is that this child is struggling to make some sense of his life using the Marvel Universe. It seems to me that Moody was pretty ahead of his time using comics as a device like this.

More recently, books like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (which won the Pulitzer in 2001), the story of cousins who write and draw comics, and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, the title taken from Superman's North Pole sanctuary which the main character Dylan identifies with, have become bestselling hits, showing that not only the writers but also the readers identify deeply with comics and their messages. We also have Smallville, the story of young Clark Kent/Superman, which melds the trials of being a teenager with the trials of accepting the inevitable destiny of saving the world. And there's Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! in which writers write about comics like I am here. Even McSweeney's, a publishing company at the forefront of contemporary literature, has gotten in on it by making their last quarterly review an all-comics issue.

Keep watching the skies. I think this is only going to become more important as this generation starts to get published and recognized. Score one for the dorks of the world who were right all along.

Posted by jack at September 23, 2004 12:04 AM