The Natural Enemies of Comics

Those who keep more than an occasional comic or two and keep such pieces longer than it takes to read them might note that a number of sentient and nonsentient creatures and forces seem hell-bent on rendering these flimsy pieces completely down the buyers' quality scale. Considering the omnipresence of the vectors of decay that can drag a comic all the way from "mint" to "poor," one might consider a comic book as the member of an ecosystem which contains almost nothing but its natural enemies. Perhaps this simply represents a flaw in the format. Or, perhaps, we see in the natural enemies of comics a special case of Murphy's Law. Regardless of the physics behind it, though, comics have a variety of natural enemies.

As well, a number of forces not inherently inimical to the physical substance of comics - nor necessarily inclined to damage paper goods at all - nonetheless act as enemies of comics by their attempts to separate fans from their comics, or to sanction those with the vision (or dubious judgment, depending on how you look at it) to take up the hobby in the first place.

Indeed, a dedicated comics consumer must perpetually direct one eye towards those forces out to undo comics - a roommate who uses them as coffee coasters on one side, a leaky ceiling on the another, and sneering outsiders everywhere eager to point a finger at the reader and, like the pod people in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," identify the bearer of secret four-color lore with the Mark of the Geek.

A description of a few of the basic hazards follows.

Children

Kids can break or destroy anything, even when trying to behave themselves. I suspect a kid actually brought down the Berlin Wall and then the grownups had to stage a ceremony for the occasion to cover their embarrassment.

Therefore, anything expensive or anything one wishes to preserve from entropic forces in general does not belong, in any form or fashion, near children. Children tear pages, bend covers, leave books on the wet grass outside, and overall almost constitute a force of nature unto themselves. When they want to annoy grown-ups, they acquire even greater destructive powers.

A child's destructive powers exist in a kind of inverse relationship to how mad cultivated society allows you to become at them, so you generally can't do anything about when they flush your Fantastic Four #4 down the commode.

This adversarial relationship between children and fragile objects causes a kind of problem for the propagation of the comics habit to subsequent generations. On the one hand, one fears to pass ten pieces of paper between two slick outer pages to a child, recalling a price that begins at three dollars and just goes up and up. On the other hand, one can't create interest in something without allowing anyone to experience it.

No one has solved the kid problem yet - not in the context of comics, nor in any other context. However, keen minds have worked on the problem since way back when.

Teachers

Those of you with enough morbid curiosity to speculate about what kind of education will produce an Ouzo Man (or his equivalent) and set him, half mad, with a stack of comics, a word processor, and an obsessive need to talk about the former to the world, might find this rare autobiographical anecdote somewhat enlightening. Others might find it reminds them of their own experience.

In the second grade, as an Ouzo Lad, I survived the attentions of a most peculiar woman, a Mrs. D*****. Mrs. D***** had the obligatory piled-high hairdo one expects from Gary Larsen cartoons, in a mixture of black and gray; similarly, she had the rhinestone-studded glasses mostly immortalized in cartoon and caricature but once fairly popular to a certain subset of matronly women between 1950 and 1975. Mrs. D***** enjoyed punishing kids and using her veto power over textbooks - not, as you might think, in some kind of politically motivated censorship campaign, but instead in her own campaign to demonstrate a superior and folksy knowledge obviously lacking in the authors of textbooks. She would inform us on matters about which our schoolbooks had attempted to mislead us. She told us that toothpaste caused cavities (with all that sweet stuff in it, it had to). She told us that all the capillaries in our body, stretched end to end, might encircle her desk three times, but certainly not the earth. She looked at a social studies illustration of a family in India with a caption about eating curry, and informed us that the book clearly suffered some kind of cognitive fault, because she had curry at home, and that stuff came as powder in a box, and you just couldn't eat it straight.

Mrs. D***** took it upon herself to keep students from reading comics in her classes. As one might expect of a woman born sometime between 1898 and 1915, she referred to such material as "funnybooks," a term that she taught me to dislike by her usage. If she saw a "funnybook" in her class, she'd threaten to take it up, so various among us developed a number of techniques for concealing such matter from her ever-vigilant eye. We had the most success with a three-hole punch that would allow us to insert comics into three-brad folders.

Although this peculiar woman did enforce her notions about paying attention in class - after all, her duties required this - she actually treated comics reading with much greater leniency than other civil disorders that might erupt in a second-grade classroom. Just to benchmark, I have distinct memories of the woman a) slapping a student and his desk to the floor for having a giggling fit that wouldn't stop; b) applying licks to Your Humble Redactor for failure to complete homework; and c) inflating all other classroom offenses in general to the point that she could exercise her spanking arm at least five or six times a day. No matter that each round of injured derrieres actually did result in improved behavior on her part; she considered it grossly negligent not to get in her daily paddlings, and if she had to get out the board for a kid who failed to sign a paper, she would.

In general, though, she did represent a fairly normal pattern for Enemies of Comics. She didn't want to see them, and intended to make a lad regret having brought them into the classroom. That the occasional lesson material appeared in this format did not modify her attitude at all; just as one didn't show up naked at a wedding (in general), one did not show up with a stack of Superboy comics in her class.

Parents

Parents represent a more touchy example of enemies of comics. Not all parents qualify. They have a fairly constant set of objections to comics from which they can draw reasons why they would prefer their spawn to eschew such material.

The Credo of Concerned Parents Worried about Comics might contain a specific set of concerns, but those of us outside of the semilegendary body of censorial arbiters of culture can only assume the following publicly occurring theories represent a significant number of those that inspire parents towards sometimes-aggressive campaigns to create a wall of separation between kids and comics:

• Comics rot the brain.
  While I can't vouch for the accuracy of this - grownups gave me comics before I ever took an intelligence test, so they lost the main opportunity to observe my plummeting IQ - I haven't subjectively observed any loss of intelligence due to comics reading. That phenomenon belongs more to activities which guarantee a loss of brains, like drug use, courtship, or talking politics. However, the atrocious content of some comics defies the ability of apologists to claim it doesn't somehow damage someone.
• Comics represent clutter.
  This one I couldn't get around. A pack rat by nature, I have the ability to fill up any available amount of space with stuff stacked precariously towards the heavens. No amount of training, no amount of alienation from my fellow man, no amount of cajoling, threatening, or bribery seem likely to disincline me to so behave. In spite of my general disbelief in deterministic causes for human behavior, I still must suspect something along the lines of a pack-rat center to my brain.
• Comics embarrass your parents.
  Where one has parents concerned about image to begin with, one will suffer. Image consciousness frequently relies on instinctive recognition of what makes good image and what makes bad image, and two judges seldom agree on much there; a son or daughter who can outguess the image-building demands of a parent so inclined has a rare gift. The rest of us simply survived, or attempted to, without having ourselves remade in some rather phony mold about which we never cared in the first place.
• Only (younger) kids read comics.
  This didn't really represent the scenario in 1977, and today even less represents the conventional comics consumer. However, various models of parenthood work on a scheme similar to the grade system of public schools, assuming that these things belong in these years of development, and that continuing interest represents some form of mental illness or immaturity.
• Comics stunt intellectual development.
  While the poor quality of many kinds of comics suggests that this process indeed happens, I can't say from experience that I've ever run into anyone stunted intellectually by reading material that failed to expand his mind. Minds tend to seek their level, like water; people who will not read will not read; and comics actually helped my own vocabulary as recently as 1977. It helps, however, if comics contain the occasional windbag who uses ten-dollar words to do the work of ten-cent ones. Thus, characters like the Vision and Mister Fantastic sometimes served as four-colored thesauri.

Without loads of research, no one should expect to allay such concerns on the part of parents. On the other hand, I don't recall hearing that Jeffrey Dahmer got his start years ago with a few issues of Youngblood and several of the neighbors' pets. As they say in Scotch courts, "Not proven."

Significant Others

In another column, I mentioned the Darwinian forces that work against people purchasing comics. In general, my argument assumed that one class of male - the kind dedicated to a kind of active sexual camouflage like in purpose, but not methods, to that practiced by a variety of animals - would carefully subtract from his interests (and personality) those traits he felt might make it difficult to attract members of the opposite sex.

Consider this tendency, then go look up a few pages of personals ads, and note how many ask for "comics fans only" as partners. Given the widespread tendency of the human male to invent for itself artificial identities and personalities with the aim of attracting mates, we can see how males would pre-emptively divest themselves of hobbies likely to keep them out of the gene pool.

I do not see in the female species any particular natural antipathy specific to comics; the problem represents a completely rational use of judgment on their part. "Select friends and partners from among that fraction of humanity least likely to measure its social success by the number of strangers neatly hewn into cubit-long chunks and wrapped in nice clean butcher's paper in your deep freeze" stands as a principle that moves many, many people of all sexes and sexual preferences. So the prospective beau who lives in a basement, away from the sun and human contact, surrounded by stacks of dubious reading matter and surgically connected by the face and eyeballs to his computer does not as a rule make it to most females' a-list of prospective mates.

Meteorological Phenomena

Skeptics may scoff, but I sometimes suspect that I have rainmaking powers. Many observant souls claim to have the ability to cause rain by washing the car. Since I almost never washed any car that I've ever owned, I can't confirm having any such automotive magics myself. Instead, I sometimes think I can make it rain by buying comics.

Now, the likelihood of rain increases with its cover price and with the degree to which rain can cause it damage. Carefully bagged comics or really cheap stuff no one really cares about for condition lack the ability to pull clouds from over the horizon to a more suitable launching grounds for ad hoc flooding.

Even fog and humidity join the atmospheric conspiracy to turn comics into slag. Moisture in the air can cause them to warp and deform in ways mathematics has just begun to understand. But the absence of humidity means no particular reprieve for comic books; the very act of reading one outdoors can produce freak winds capable of ripping a comic from its covers.

Therefore, one does best to keep the things indoors, except during those short periods where one must pass them out to the great outer world of comics-eating hazards. Perhaps the future will see a day when weather control allows some factor of safety for comics; or, perhaps greater protection methods can solve this problem. If the ultrasecret NORAD bunkers underground in the Rocky Mountains ever become completely obsolescent, they might provide excellent reading rooms for comics fans, where a mile of solid bedrock separates the comic from the attempts of the atmosphere to rain water on the paper.

Cats

Cats, for all the things they do that make them passable companions (especially the part where they don't ask you what made you hours and hours late coming home), represent a threat to comics, particularly the old-style pieces made of newsprint.

Newsprint, for one of its properties, absorbs water and other fluids mostly made of water, fairly reliably. When it dries, it distorts, like other papers.

Cats, as their part in this gestalt, have a few basic jobs. Cats follow the First Law of Cats - "Every cat-sized container must contain a cat;" the Second Law of Cats - "If you can, knock it over;" and the Third Law of Cats - "What sits on the floor, that mayest though relieve thyself upon."

Cat urine does dreadful things to comics. It invests them with changes of color and smell which no remedial action can undo. If you collect to keep, it makes a comic unstoreable; if you collect to sell, it makes a comic unsaleable; and only a particularly stubborn comics fan would even consider keeping a piece adorned with the hue and bouquet of that which issueth from a cat.

Other Comics Fans

Out there, in the wild, exist what we might call Predator Fans. Like other comics fans, they have pieces they want and seek out, for whatever reason - collecting, reading, speculating, resale, or some combination thereof. However, these Predator Fans have no particular principle against letting someone else do the work and collecting the rewards themselves.

In nature, the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and allows its hatchlings to push rival "siblings" out of the nests to their death from falling or from ground-based predators. In marriage, husband- and wife-stealers choose their partners preferentially from among the married to save themselves the trouble of doing the screening for acceptable partners themselves.

Predator Fans steal from the collections of other collectors. Sometimes they steal the collections entire.

Before you goggle at how rarely this must happen, consider my own experience. I never had a collection worth mentioning, but some of my peers did; and a single predator managed to extract any piece with a resale value from their collections to add to his own, thanks to the collusion-through-negligence of parents who did things like allow this viper access to their children's rooms in their absence.

Gravity

Gravity generally does not work for comics. Without a supporting environment, one generally can't stack the things, and this problem gets worse with the more gloss and enamel one invests in the papers used to print them. Various contrivances to make them stand vertically, for more easy searching, tend to allow them to bend in the middle, creating a permanently curved piece.

Gravity can bend, warp, twist, roll spines, and generally do things to a comic that no chiropractor can undo. In general, this won't matter, but it does incline readers to invest in a) boxes (which one must travel to Comic Shop Land to acquire) or b) comics in trade paperback or hardback format (so that they have the necessary structural integrity to allow less rigorous methods of storage).

Travel

Transporting comics has a peculiar ability to make them disappear. While large objects like seafaring craft and airplanes tend to vanish while traveling over particular parts of the earth, comics have the ability to vanish essentially any time one chooses to move them through a door. Isaac Newton would have described this phenomenon when composing his theories of physics but for the unfortunate absence of any comics to observe disappearing in his day.

Like any form of matter subject to Murphy's Law, comics seem more likely to disappear in direct proportion to their ticket price. However, sometimes human vectors intervene; see "Other Comics Fans" elsewhere in this column. More important, however, in inducing a comic to disappear, the time spent finding the thing in the first place, plus the time spent waiting for it to arrive, both contribute to the likelihood that it will simply depart from the known physical universe.

Old Man Time

What other forces and actors fail to achieve, Old Man Time will make up for eventually. The facts make me suspect he truly has some kind of attitude problem. He lives to work things over. He rigorously enforces the Second Law of Thermodynamics in spite of the many benefits we could realize through its violation.

He turns paper yellow and makes it crumble. He rubs colors off pages. He fades the reds. And he uses every other destructive technique mentioned on this page to get at your comics.

Many of us long to say, "Why so harsh, Old Man Time?" Yet no one has yet had the courage to assign a Congressional oversight committee to investigate just how much damage Time chooses to do on an annual basis - the capital depreciations, the deaths, the continental drift, the heat death of the universe, and, of course, the ruination of comics.

The Thin Clear Line

Bags, lots of them, and boxes, lots of them, seem the best method of thwarting the various methods and agents of comics destruction. Bags keep out moisture; bags can slow the rate of oxidation of paper; bags can act like an old-style girdle in making it that much harder to get at the stuff inside and thereby deter the activities that cause most of the problems in the first place.

However, anything that keeps dangers away from comics also keeps readers away from them. In some ways, a bag serves a comic the same purpose as a coffin serves a body: What enters it might stay there forever, and no one might ever see it again. For the casket, we recognize this as a wise policy (if we want to see the cadavers of yesteryear, we can pay Hollywood special effects techs to simulate the material with drippy gobs of silicon goo and skip aspects like the squirmy parts and the smell).

Yet the bag (and its older sibling, the box) serve as the heroes in the drama of comics destruction, providing a thin vinyl line between the future and a world that likes to play the role of Destroyer of Comics.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at [email protected].

Column 226. Completed 11-FEB-2001.