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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 1, 2018 15:19:24 GMT -5
A Comic Fan’s Memories, Part 31 (Sept 2018)“The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”I don’t know exactly when it happened, only that it did. Someone may have snickered, or pointed, or laughed out loud. Whatever happened, I knew that my love and I were being made fun of. Oh, it was okay to be open with the few friends who had the same predilection, but gradually even they seemed reticent to admit that they’d ever felt the same pangs and joys as I still I did. “Oh, you still do that?” they’d say, and I’d catch myself in some excuse. “Oh, not really, I’ve pretty much stopped, too.” Of course my parents had never approved, so I was accustomed to the sneaking, the fibbing, the hiding, and the rationalizing. I was lucky, though; I had a sympathetic grandmother who didn’t mind my indulging my pulpy friends and me when I stayed a night or two at her house on the other side of town. (All of a mile away. It was a pretty small town.) When I started high school, things were both better and worse. Better because there were more opportunities to find new friends, but worse because the chances of being outed were greater. It wasn’t until senior year that I came out to my closest school friends. They were okay with it, chalking it up to my general weirdness. My parents never quite got over it but my persistence finally wore them down, I guess, and they grew to accept that I was… that way. But there would be many, many heartbreaking moments along the way. Still, I never dreamed back then that I would be able to be open about my love, that there would be so many more like me, and that I not only could speak about my deep and abiding love, but boast about it, too. Or that someday, my love would be celebrated, that movies and television shows devoted to it would be popular with literally millions of people unashamed to brag, boast and proclaim their love. Well, it was not like that back when I was a kid, when comics were the other love that dared not speak its name. Mine was a time that you could not admit to most people that you loved comics, when you’d fold a comic in half and tuck it under the back of your jacket or into a notebook before you’d admit to reading one. With most friends, they were considered for little kids only. Kids my age who read comics were mocked. For grown-ups, they were a waste of time and money as well as a sign of immaturity. For my parents, they were forbidden for reasons they never really explained. I don’t remember when or why they laid down the law, but I know it had to have been before the spring of ’66, when my love for comics was in full bloom. I know that because I have a distinct memory of walking home, probably from playing basketball or stickball down at my school, on a Saturday afternoon in that spring, the spring of my seventh grade. On my way home, I bought World’s Finest 157, and on the way home, I read it cover to cover, from the typically goofy Superman-Batman story to two-page letter column, to the reprint, to the cool full-page house ad, right to the Direct Currents column at the end of the book. It was a mile walk, about half of it up two steep hills, so it usually took about 15 minutes, including the time to pick out a comic at the candy store, buy a soda and a Ring Ding at the deli, and throw a few rocks into the brook that you walked across on the rocks (the short-cut). Anyway, as I got about 12 houses from mine, maybe a minute from home, I could see that my parents were standing on the sidewalk outside our house, looking down the street toward me. I was dumbfounded; this was not like them; they never did this. To me it was as if they were checking for me to see if I was on my way home. Maybe they were. Like every other kid, I figured they were waiting for me because I was in trouble. My teacher must have called or the cops were looking for me or whatever. That’s when I remembered that I was holding my freshly devoured copy of World’s Finest 157 in my disobedient little hand. I might as well have been smoking a cigarette. No way I could have been doing that and disposed of it without them seeing me. Same with WF 157. What could I do to save my forbidden love? Each step I took toward them brought me into clearer focus. Quickly -- and in my mind, surreptitiously -- I slowly rolled and slid #157 up the right sleeve of my shirt. Yeah, sure, that’ll fool ‘em. Then they waved at me. Good sign. They never would have done that if they were ticked at me. I was a little relieved. Though I can’t say it didn’t occur to me that they were suckering me in. They’d done that before. Instinctively I started to wave back with my left arm. Maybe I was not in trouble. But then I felt World’s Finest 157 sliding down my right sleeve. I aborted my wave to keep it from sliding out. I must have been a sweatshirt with baggy sleeves. Less than 150 feet away, I knew it looked really suspicious. As I remember it, my parents said nothing and I think I just wordlessly surrendered my secret love. “I wish I knew how to quit you,” I didn’t say. But that’s how I felt. For the next few years, I was like a guerilla fighter. I used subterfuge, sneakiness, and some deft disguising to smuggle quite a nice batch of comics into my room, where there were many neat places to hide them. By the time freshman year of high school had arrived, my parents had turned a blind eye toward me. One advantage of having five younger siblings. I couldn’t express my love in public, but I could carry on our affair with dignity, if not impunity. My idyllic times would only last a short time, however. Next time: The End of the Innocence
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Post by brutalis on Oct 1, 2018 15:41:23 GMT -5
What a difference a decade makes. During my early foray into comics and then full fledged collecting which was just about a decade after you Prince Hal the only derision I received came from my mother. Kids my age were all reading comics regularly and if they couldn't afford they were trading and borrowing. I know it sound crazy but reading comics wasn't considered something to hide in my time. I had lots of trade friends and neighbors all throughout my school days from around 5th grade through the end of high school. Heck I was proud of my collecting and well into working (even today had somebody ask me questions) in my 20's and into now my mid 50's I have workers compliment and ask me to help them finding comics they might remember as a child and hope to replace some of them. They even ask me about the LCS's and which do I shop at and which do I recommend. How the times have changed. I do sympathize with you and can understand the problems you faced and overcame. In some ways all of us have either had similar situations with what we love. When I was a child my parents could never quite understand how I could spend so much time with both of my grandfathers doing things with them. They never had that desire for closeness with their grandparents. I learned lots from both of these men. One showed me the inside glory of used bookstores and an appreciation for the Pulps and watching old black and white movies of horror, cops/robbers, musical/dance and such. The other was more of an outdoors type so through him I learned fishing, riding/caring for and about horses/wildlife/nature and the thrills of old western cowboy movies. The wonderful part is that you survived the hardships and tribulations and held onto your forbidden 4 color love and can today speak of it openly with others who understand and acknowledge going through similar situations.
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 1, 2018 16:00:36 GMT -5
Well, brutalis , thanks, but I don't want to paint too grim a picture of my upbringing. My problems, were mostly, as they say, First World problems. But you are so right about the influences that make us what we are. We humans are hard-wired in lots of ways, and we never know where the necessary spark is going to come from that ignites one of our buried or latent interests. Neither of my sons has more than a passing interest in sports despite my all-consuming love for baseball and my overall love of all things sports-related. But they both like comics. My daughter, on the other hand, not only loves sports, she played four years of varsity HS softball, watches nearly every Celtics and Sox game, plays in two or three co-ed softball leagues, is now trying golf, and has been that way since she was four. Hasn't read a comic in her life, though. The guys love their music (they're actually on the Midwestern leg of a tour as we speak) but beyond simply loving all kinds of music, my wife and I can't play a note. Your grandparents sound similar to the one of my four that I knew, who kind of let me explore when i was at her house. We watched old movies together, we walked to the stores, she talked about the old days, and all of that interested me. It may be that the grandparents feel the need to keep the old things alive within their grandchildren, to make those younger ones aware that everything didn't just start yesterday, that "old" doesn't necessarily mean "bad" or "stupid." Anyway, you're right. Not having to hide what you love, indeed, being able to share it with others of all ages, is yet one more kind of happiness that springs from it. Thanks for reading and for your nice words. So glad you had great times with your grandfathers. I would have loved them, too!
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Post by brutalis on Oct 1, 2018 16:32:21 GMT -5
But you are so right about the influences that make us what we are. We humans are hard-wired in lots of ways, and we never know where the necessary spark is going to come from that ignites one of our buried or latent interests.The above is so true Prince Hal. Nobody in the family can figure out where my enthusiasm (and small skill) for art came from as the only ever "artist" in the family was my great great grandfather who started to draw and oil paint in his 60's merely out of boredom. I have a total disinterest in sports now other than if watching it with friends or co-workers and will skip over games on television. Yet my dad and uncles and cousins are all addicted and can quote stats left and right. I am a cat person when all any of my family were all dog people and my mother hated cats with a passionate fear and loathing. My dad and uncles swim like a fish and I inherited my mother's fear of water and have never really learned to swim properly and I begin to panic when my feet can't touch the bottom. I am the ONLY one of my family who collects comic books, as the few cousins which ever did any collecting as children all quite once they were older and got rid of any comics they had. I enjoy all types of music where my family predominately listen's to country music or classic rock and roll. They wonder where I acquired a liking for Jazz and Classical? I fell in love with anime and manga in junior high but can't read or understand Japanese and I would get crazy looks from family when during high school I watched borrowed VHS copies of anime; even when they had no sub-titles. Maybe the spark for many of us is the loose internal mental wiring within ourselves which fires a passion for things that are outside of our usual background and experiences?
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 1, 2018 17:09:29 GMT -5
Maybe the spark for many of us is the loose internal mental wiring within ourselves which fires a passion for things that are outside of our usual background and experiences? Along those lines, yes, since our ancestors survived by drawing comparisons, looking for exceptions to patterns, contrasts, and distinguishing differences. Maybe when we notice such distinctions and determine that they are not a danger to us, we seek them out in order to learn more about them. I also think that we are the sum of all who have gone before. Our gene pools (in most cases ) run far deeper than we might think.
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Post by beccabear67 on Oct 1, 2018 18:14:36 GMT -5
If anyone thought I was dopey for reading comics it never bothered me (too much, I was already a bit behind in terms of not wearing the cool clothes/shoes/whatever, and I had stuffed animals around a lot, still do). I knew lots of kids who read comics, older and younger than me, and would borrow and trade. I knew other kids who's parents didn't allow them to read comics, one or two could have Tin Tin in French though, sucks to be a bit upper-class I would think! I met a girl one summer who could draw, I was with my grandparents in their trailer and we would sit at the table and try and draw things from my Scamp and Chip N' Dale comics. Never saw her again but kept drawing on my own. It became a little bit of my identity at school that I could draw Snoopy or later Garfield. Maybe that made my being into comic books more okay. Once in school the teacher even got me to teach art class on constructing a cartoon character on the black board and everyone drawing along. It seems like there was a shift in the '60s where young people went from wanting to be adult and grow out of things like pop music, monster movies, science fiction paperbacks and comic books, to where youth and fun was sort of the ideal for everyone. Of course anyone who read a lot of comics knew some of them could be very thought provoking and even inspirational, same as sf, monster stories and rock music ( A Day In the Life, Yesterday, Turn Turn Turn, Universal Solider). I don't idealize the '60s but I definitely admire it from a slight distance and respect the many positive things that came out of it along with some negatives (wars, assassinations, drugs as fun for example).
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Post by Farrar on Oct 1, 2018 20:04:10 GMT -5
It was OK for my mother to buy us kids Woody Woodpecker (my fave) and Donald Duck and the like to keep us busy, but once I got a bit older and graduated to superheroes she was very annoyed by my continuing love of comic books. Once, while walking me home for lunch (which is what we did in grade school before I switched to a school outside of my district), she unexpectedly told me she had gotten some new comics for me. Oh, I couldn't wait to get home to see the new comics! At the time I was into the DC superheroes, mostly Batman, the Superman-related books, and Wonder Woman. Anyway when we got home she said "Here, these are the comics you should be reading!" and she thrust this into my eagerly awaiting, outstretched hands {Spoiler: Click to show} What the--?? I had never heard of Peanuts before and believe me, these did not hold a candle to my precious DCs!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 2, 2018 21:09:46 GMT -5
Wow I was extremely fortunate. It NEVER mattered to my parents that I read comic books. Even as an adult. They were happy because I read a lot of stuff in addition to comics. As far as my friends? I admit in high school (late 70's) I didn't reveal to anyone that I read comics. But in college (early 80's)I didn't care what people thought of me especially since I ended up working in a LCS during college.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 3, 2018 4:46:47 GMT -5
I mentioned the attitude of my parents about my comics reading over at brutalis' Remember When thread, but on the topic of mockery over comics-reading by other kids, especially in school, I can say I rarely experienced that. I went to a really small parochial elementary school (seriously, four classrooms) in a relatively rural area, and initially - up to about third grade - all of the boys read at least some comics, and until eighth grade there were still two of us that read comics regularly, so no ribbing or bullying (not even from older kids, as a number of them were also comics readers). In high school it never really came up, but by my sophomore year I had already drastically cut down on comics anyway. In my wider family, i.e., not just my siblings but also cousins, I was the only one who read comics, but again, nobody teased me about it or anything (one exception: when I was about 12, one of my oldest cousins, who was in college at the time, came up to me when I was sitting on the couch reading a comic book and said, while trying - and failing - to put on this cool demeanor, something like: 'You shouldn't read those, they'll corrupt your mind.' I glanced up at him, said nothing, and continued reading. That clown is a lost case, I think he's actually a member of Opus Dei now.)
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 3, 2018 8:13:24 GMT -5
nobody teased me about it or anything (one exception: when I was about 12, one of my oldest cousins, who was in college at the time, came up to me when I was sitting on the couch reading a comic book and said, while trying - and failing - to put on this cool demeanor, something like: 'You shouldn't read those, they'll corrupt your mind.' I glanced up at him, said nothing, and continued reading. That clown is a lost case, I think he's actually a member of Opus Dei now.) Why doesn't this surprise me? Threatened by anything that's different or that might make you think... And elitist.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 20, 2020 15:47:05 GMT -5
Thanks for plugging this thread, shaxper. My guilt about not following up is prodding me to add the next entry to this saga. Been thinking about doing so lately. Will get cracking! I predict that this comic, from the late summer of 1966, will appear in my reminiscing...
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,378
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Post by shaxper on Jan 20, 2020 20:25:08 GMT -5
Thanks for plugging this thread, shaxper. My guilt about not following up is prodding me to add the next entry to this saga. Been thinking about doing so lately. Will get cracking! I guilt for the common good 😁
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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 23, 2020 0:20:58 GMT -5
Thanks for plugging this thread, shaxper . My guilt about not following up is prodding me to add the next entry to this saga. Been thinking about doing so lately. Will get cracking! I predict that this comic, from the late summer of 1966, will appear in my reminiscing... My favorite thing about this comic is … The Gorilla Gang! They are awesome! Almost as awesome as … the Crime Rocket!
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 30, 2020 12:21:58 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories, Part 32 (January, 2020)"The Golden Age of everything is twelve."* August, 1966 This might have been the last summer I was completely a kid. I had turned 12 in May, didn’t have a summer job, and spent most of my summer just hanging around. My friends and I played baseball a bit, but mostly I remember roaming around my beloved hometown. It was not even a dot on any map, if you ever even saw it on a map, but to us it might as well have been Ultima Thule. In truth, it was like a thousand other small towns, but for me, it was as close as I thought would ever get to the gates of horn and ivory. That summer, like the ones before, found me and various friends wandering through the woods behind the houses up the street, tracing the stream that ran through the park and down behind the flag factory (site of every Cub Scout den’s first field trip), and hiking along the ridge above the infamous insane asylum. My peripatetic summer also took me to the candy stores on the Avenue, though by this time, I was alone among my friends in my love for comics and usually planned those trips when I was unaccompanied. The flag factory "The Avenue" The Asylum
My love hadn’t diminished exactly, but I was becoming so enamored of sports that whatever spare change I could scrape up went for SPORT magazine. Those 35 cents plus a penny would have bought me three comics each month, but the pulpy pages of SPORT had proved a worthy rival to the newsprint of the go-go check era of DC Comics. Still, there was one comic that summer that I somehow found enough money to buy: Batman 185, an annual featuring stories starring Robin. It was an annual to begin with, and if there was a bigger bargain in comics in 1966 than 25 cents for 80 pages of Nirvana, I don’t know what it was. Anyway, although the cover on this one didn’t grab me nearly the way a later Batman Annual’s would, I knew I had to have it. I had liked Batman from the first time I had read one of his stories (“Prisoners of Three Worlds,” in Batman 153, on sale in December 1962, when I was all of eight years old) for lots of reasons, but by the summer of 1966, after being elated by news back in January that a Batman TV show was coming on TV, and then completely disappointed by what I saw as a betrayal of all that was good and holy (no pun intended) about him, I had drifted further into sports as my go-to escape reading. But the main attraction of the annual, “Robin Died at Dawn,” the “complete book-length novel,” made me need to have it. I have to confess that I still can’t be sure if I had read “Batman Dies at Dawn” three years earlier in Batman 156, or whether this was my first encounter with it. Either way, this was, and remains, one of the iconic Batman stories for me. Looking back, I realize that Robin, as a character, was not one of the reasons I would have given for reading Batman stories. For me it was all about the detective, the master of all kinds of weapons and fighting, the gimmicks in his utility belt, and yes, even though the emphasis in those days was not really on his creature-of-the-night aspects, Batman’s eeriness. Of all the DC super-heroes, only Batman fought at night; only Batman prowled the streets of a thug-and-gangster bedeviled city. He had the weirdest villains, the darkest and least modern city, and he wore the same muted colors as the crooks he constantly came up against. (Some of this atmosphere I probably absorbed from this collection of ancient stories -- they went back almost 30 years! – that was one of the wonderful unintended consequences of the Batman TV show and which I had picked up in a Great Eastern store, the Walmart of its day.) But Robin? Never for one moment thought of him as one of the reasons I read Batman or Detective. And yet… To be continued… *One variation of a line originally written about science-fiction by Peter Graham in 1957.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 30, 2020 16:50:59 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories, Part 33 (January, 2020)"The Golden Age of everything is twelve."* (Part two) I was explaining that I didn’t read Batman comics because I identified myself with Robin; he wasn’t my gateway character. I liked Batman: strong, smart, cool costume. Why Robin went around in elf-shoes and bare legs was beyond me. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in that outfit. But… There was that one part in the aforementioned “Prisoners of Three Worlds” I had particularly enjoyed, when Robin and Bat-Girl, alone on some faraway planet, go as far as a Silver Age comic would let them. “Me likey,” I must have thought, or words to that effect. So this was what romance was like! I liked all these mature feelings and blush lines that appeared in those panels. Just nine years old, yes, but like every other kid since dirt was new, I preferred being “talked up to.” Even if I didn’t have a clue what the word meant, I knew condescension when I heard it from various random adults in my life. But here was a kid around my age in a moment of crisis letting his emotions hang out there. And with a cute blonde, no less. Now, it wasn’t like I was looking for romantic advice from Robin; when I was nine, I was way more interested in comics, sports, and war movies, but I was glad that somebody acknowledged that we readers weren’t just kids; our emotions, however undeveloped, were reachable, and we didn’t need to have them disrespected just because were too young to know what the hell to do with all of them. Of course, there was no romance, just bro-mance in “Robin Dies at Dawn,” but the story’s focus on the love between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson (Go to hell, Dr. Wertham!) was an apt reminder of an oft-neglected aspect of their story. “Robin Dies at Dawn” put a momentary stop to the endless parade of eight-page adventures in which the two were not human beings, but simply their costumed alter-egos going through the usual Kabuki as they corralled the villain, alien or monster of the month. (This was 1963, remember.) The mixture of heartbreak and heroism in Bill Finger’s story elevated it far above the average Batman story of the time. Admittedly not the highest of bars, but even today the story works very well on a human level as it gets to the core of the love – and respect -- between Batman and Robin. It’s the type of Silver Age story that, if redrawn in a more modern style, would come across as far less silly than it probably does to a contemporary audience. Although, there is a kind of primitivist charm to the Paris-Moldoff artwork that perfectly suits the virtuousness of Robin’s feelings and his sacrifice, however symbolic it was. That cascade of raw emotion was rare in Silver Age DC books, and especially in the Batman books. There was emotion elsewhere, yes (probably most obvious in the Legion stories in Adventure), but most of it was the cheap melodramatic soap-opera stuff that was the hallmark of Mort Weisinger’s Superman-Lois Lane snit-fits. That sincerity and genuine emotion were only half of the story’s strength, however. You may recall that Batman 156 did something rarely if ever seen in a DC Silver Age book. The first story served as a prologue to the second. Even that kind of minor continuity was unheard of back then. And on top of that, the book’s title character didn’t appear in that prologue. And on top of that, Robin gets to shine all by himself, something nobody had seen since his six-year solo stint in Star-Spangled Comics (didn’t intend all that alliteration) ended in 1952. And on top of that, Ace, the Bat-Hound appears! So Robin proves himself without the help of his mentor in the first part of this story, and then, in what is as vivid and real as the best dreams are, gives his life to save his father’s. And Batman’s anguished cries as he holds Robin’s lifeless body sound as achingly sad and simple and inadequate as any father’s would. “He died so I could live! Oh, Robin… Robin…” No fancy eulogy, no line of elegiac poetry, just the mournful “Oh, Robin… Robin…” You bet this hit Little Prince Hal hard! And the loneliness of that next panel was even worse. Odd that the cover, so evocative, so striking and now so etched in comics lore, never appears as a panel in the story itself. Almost as if it’s too grand for the stoic tone of the actual tale it represents. And then, later on, when Robin realizes that there will be no Batman any more, he allows himself a quick comic book sob and then shoulders his responsibility like a man. No, Batman and Robin didn’t have any hug-it-out moment at the end of the story, and no, there was no mutual baring of their souls and feelings, and there certainly weren’t full-page in-your-face depictions of Batman’s face in full anger-scream mode yelling, “ROBIN DEAD? I SWEAR I’LL FIND YOUR KILLER, AND WHEN I DO, I’LL BRING HIM TO JUSTICE… MY JUSTICE!!!” Or crap like that. No, there was only the simplicity of the Silver Age, which allowed the reader to fill in the spaces between the panels, to read into the honest, if somewhat inexpressive faces of the characters, to enjoy something more than just the usual Batman-and- Robin-catch-bad-guy story. Like the movies of the 30s and 40s, the sub-text was there; you just had to look carefully to find it. “Robin Dies at Dawn” was all any Batman reader needed to bring home the depth of the feelings between Batman and Robin and what made their friendship unique. I realized, too, just how much I would have liked to be like Robin: independent, strong, courageous, self-confident, and respected by the most important adults in his life. Neither Robin nor Batman needed teary protestations or forced declarations of love. They showed it in their actions; they lived it. And that’s why Li’l Prince Hal, in the last summer of his childhood, loved this story. And why Old Prince Hal still does.
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