Pathetic Fallacy

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet

One summer’s day when I was nine or ten I walked into the children’s book room of the small public library in my small midwestern town. The children’s room was in the oldest part of the library, which used to be a single-family Victorian house, and in spite of renovation the space still felt homey in a way I couldn’t express. A shaft of light streamed in through a high window, catching motes of dust and falling on an old wingback chair. There was no one else there—my town had a dearth of readers, at least of my age. On top of a shelf was displayed a copy of James and the Giant Peach; the original edition with the real illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. This was a book of whose existence I was aware (from lists in Roald Dahl’s other books) but which I had never read. I took the book to the chair and leafed through it and for just a moment, Burkert’s luminous, gauzy illustrations coupled with the sunbeam and I had a sensation of flight and of being unmoored in time. I was entirely alone, and I sat there, a long while, until my mother came looking for me.

Ever since, I have chased after that emotion, whatever it was. I haven’t found it, but I have found other moments as profound and as hard to categorize. When I was a teenager I spent an afternoon walking through snow following rabbit tracks farther and farther out of town. When I hit a stand of trees I looked up to see a flaming sky, more red than I could imagine, as the sun hovered low between branches; it was past dinnertime, and I felt acutely aware of the earth’s rotation. There have been other moments.

Early this year, looking for some answers to depression, lack of direction, and some other troubling personal issues, I had a psych evaluation. I was suspecting a diagnosis of ADHD. Instead, the analyst told me I have a High-functioning Autism, formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome (before the publication of DSM 5). This came as something of a shock to me. I was 52 and had never suspected. Asperger’s has only been a diagnoses since 1992, and I was in graduate school by then. When I relayed this information to friends and family, I found that some shared my surprise, but other shrugged and said it figured. I thought about my social anxiety, my tendency to be quiet and then speak in stuttering bursts, my inability to hold eye contact, and eventually I realized that yeah, it pretty much figured.

The thing I think about most is the number of times in my life people have said to me, “John, I passed you in the hall and you didn’t even look at me,” or “John, I sent you an email and you never responded,” or “John, is something wrong? You’re not looking at me, and you look upset.” Actually these observations have often been made by others to my wife, Marina, who has dutifully and patiently told everyone that yes, John likes you, it’s nothing you did, that’s just how he is. When you get to know him, he’ll talk your ear off.

I worry about my diagnosis. I don’t want to be rude to people, I want them to like me. I don’t want to be awkward. Why did I never suspect this basic fact about myself? Is it something I can compensate for, or is this just me? Can I be present for friends and family, or am I always going to live in my head?

I was discussing my anxieties to a good friend over Zoom—he was one of those who was entirely unsurprised by my revelation. He had for many years dated a woman with HFA, and he found her delightful. “It’s a wonderful gift you have. You have all these interests and ideas and you live this interior life that is rich and expansive. You give everyone else a different perspective.”

Yes, I said, but I also confuse people. And I push them away, and I need so much time to myself.

“But you care about other people. And they can feel that. And the rest you can work out.”

Shortly after this conversation I was on a morning COVID walk with Marina—we have spent the long days of pandemic isolation becoming minutely familiar with local parks—and I through the trees I had a fleeting glimpse of the library and the sunlight and the peach, and something like the memory of flight. I realized that my solitary childhood reveries were also a gift from this condition, and I realized that whatever challenges my mind may pose, it has more moments to give.

Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending

In spite of being a tiny town surrounded by endless fields of corn and soybeans, Eureka, Illinois used to have a small movie theater, the Woodford, whose Art Deco stylings dated to 1937. It had once been charming (or at least serviceable) enough, seating 400, but the time I knew it in the 70’s the theater had become a sad thing, with patches of the original carpeting replaced here and there by linoleum, haphazard electrical conduit tracing the walls like vine, and a semi-functional bathroom the size of phone booth (all my references date me) whose pull-chain toilet had seen the end of tens of thousands of movie-goers.

The Woodford Theater had settled to the bottom of the distributional food chain, showing second-run movies three times a week and softcore exploitation films late Friday nights. Within a few years, VCRs would kill the market for both of these services.

In 1980, New World Pictures released Battle Beyond the Stars. Today I know all about Roger Corman and his infamous studio and that this film was conceived as a prestige project for the company, a retelling of The Magnificent Seven but with its cowboys in space (there is an actual character in the movie called “Space Cowboy”). It even has a screenplay by indie darling John Sayles. But at the time I was 12 and all I knew was that an article in Starlog was calling this a more adult version of Star Wars and Star Wars was the Best in Life. The movie did star John-Boy from the Waltons, and I was not a fan that show, but probably he wasn’t so important, right?

My brother and I went to see it on “opening” night, which was probably a month or so after it had been in release. The crowd of maybe 60 or so was mostly bored kids who didn’t have a license or a car and couldn’t make it to Peoria and so were stuck sitting here in the theater’s torn, creaking seats. The audiences at the Woodford were always noisy, but for some reason that night the movie was late in starting, and stray pieces of popcorn were already being lobbed in lazy arcs. Twenty minutes past screentime, the house lights were still on. A chant went up: “Lights! Lights!” The lights went down, but still no picture. The audience booed. Then at last the credits began: cheers! But why was there no music? Some ugly murmuring. The first scene, involving the destruction of a peaceful spaceship by a looming alien warcraft played out in complete silence. “Sound! Sound!” went a new chant, but no sound came through the expository sequences, which consisted mostly of a scene of a futuristic city where John-Boy and his compatriots stood around in robes and stared at the invaders’ ship. As it became apparent that no dialog would be forthcoming, the audience began to yell questions: “What’s even happening?” “Why are they just standing there?” and “Where’s Jim-Bob?” Someone started to sing the Star Wars theme and many people joined in.

About ten minutes into the movie, the sound abruptly came on with a deafening crack of static, and the audience cheered. John-Boy was in a spaceship: a bulbous, sagging form that looked as if it could use a space bra, flying away from his besieged planet, adjusting some instruments and talking to his ship’s computer, which had a sassy woman’s voice and calls him “kid”—and then the image froze, followed by the classic bubbling and melting of scorched celluloid, and there was a riot of teens and pre-teens jumping out of their seats and tossing Jolly Ranchers at the projection booth. The lights came up and an usher walked in, half-heartedly held up his hands in a gesture of quieting, and then shrugged and left. The lights went down again and now there was a scene involving a lizard man talking to a captive woman strung up by her hands in some futuristic cell. “What the F—K?” yelled an older kid from the front row and the usher reappeared. “No language. Watch the goddamn movie,” he barked.

Every character had a defining tic or phrase that the audience picked up and responded to. Space Cowboy would mention at every opportunity that he came from Earth and so whenever a scene cut to him someone would shout “from Planet Earth” before Vaughn could. The sound continued to die for minutes at a time and during these moments the crowd yelled out catchphrases, sound effects, and expletives, but the usher did not return. There was no need; the atmosphere had changed from surly and combative to giddy, engaged, and even strangely affectionate. We had long ago given up on the movie as a movie and had moved on to the movie as a Happening. To be honest, I don’t remember much about the movie’s second half. I remember people cheering whenever Sybil Danning or Robert Vaughn showed up to chew more scenery; mock-sobbing whenever one of the ragtag group of defenders met a violent end; and jumping out of their seats in delight whenever the sound cut or the film broke, which it did many times. Eventually the film ended and the audience rose to a standing ovation.

The plot of Battle Beyond the Stars, such as it is, involves John-Boy’s character traveling through space to secure the aid of mercenaries to fight back his planets’ invaders, since his home world is aggressively pacifistic, as befits an alien culture based entirely on white robes and large crystals. He meets aliens wearing space-clown makeup who have third eyes, as well as an intergalactic trucker named Space Cowboy, played by Space Robert Vaughn (space slumming it). But most memorably for the crowd reaction, he meets a Space Valkyrie portrayed by Sybil Danning, a warrior in a metal bikini and winged headpiece who lounges reclined in her fighter ship with the camera shot straight up her heaving bosom. When she delivered her lines about the glories of the warrior life in as low a register as she could manage, her chest rose and fell with such force that the audience began to breathe loudly along with her in an imitation of Darth Vader.

In this post- Mystery Science Theater world we are familiar with the joys of bad movies, of Troll 2 and The Room. Battle Beyond the Stars is not a great film, nor do I think that it’s hilariously awful—it’s just a hack job from a time when there was a theatrical market for knockoffs of other, better movies. I wouldn’t recommend watching it today on DVD or YouTube, even ironically. But that experience, in that sad little broken-down movie house was one of the most joyful I have known.

Within three years of this screening, the Woodford Theatre closed. Today the building is a thrift store.

That's Why They Call you Rubberhead

You may not have noticed, but over Thanksgiving there were a lot of online sales. One of these led me to notice a new compilation of old Casper comics from the improbably named publisher American Mythology, whose business model appears to be licensing properties from your childhood, assuming you’re, like me, 50 years old or more. Since I read a metric ton of Harvey Comics when I was a child, and since I have largely forgotten about them since I was ten, and since it was on sale for Black Friday BUY NOW, I bought it.

In ye olden days, comics were sold in groceries, pharmacies, and even hardware stores as point-of-purchase impulse buys to keep the kids amused. This was the age of the Hey !! Kids Comics wire display, and in addition to Marvel and D.C. there were Archie, Harvey, Gold Key, Charlton, and probably others who came and went in the mix. The advent of a direct market for comics—e.g., comics / ephemera shops and dedicated sections in bookstores—was a bonanza for superhero publishers and a boon for the indie publishers I fell in love with, but it spelled the end for many publishers of kids’ stuff. Only Archie survived, and mostly through its digest-sized books that fit comfortably in grocery checkouts between copies of Prevention.

Harvey Comics was very much a creature of its time, founded upon licensed characters, drawing into its fold properties as disparate as the slinky 1940’s spy heroine Black Cat (not to be confused with Black Cat) and the WWII humor-in-uniform comic Sad Sack, along with Casper, who was already famous for his Paramount cartoon series before becoming the flagship title for Harvey. Eventually the character of Richie Rich would be originated for the company by cartoonist Warren Kremer, whose bulbous forms and supple ink lines defined the Harvey “look,” although sadly he was uncredited in the comics, as was the policy for most companies at the time. It gives me pause to think of the nameless artists who passed through Harvey, required to sublimate their styles into Kremer’s. A few would gain recognition—such as the remarkable Ernie Colón, whose career spanned from Richie Rich to Eerie to Battlestar Galactica to “adult” comics for Epic Illustrated.

The table of contents for this collection credits Kremer and Howie Post for the stories, although I suspect that there were other hands involved in some of the pieces. It would be nice to have a listing of the original publication dates and titles, but this is definitely a no-corners-uncut production. The art seems to have been scanned from printed comics, with all the smudgy lines and splotchy Ben-Day dots on proud display, and then blowing the whites out and saturating the colors in Photoshop. From the style and printing quality these stories appear to be from the 60s and/or 70s. While the academic in me is disappointed, in an odd way this presentation is true to its source material: Harvey would often reprint and repackage segments, never giving credit, and since the stories were entirely stand-alone and the style was homogenous, and they were for kids anyway, who cares?

This is a long way to go to say that when I actually read the stories I was not prepared for how weird and confusing they would be. For the uninitiated, Casper is a Good Little ghost, which means he is nice in vague ways to the forest creatures he hangs out with. Ghost culture seems to consist entirely of scaring humans by yelling “boo!” at them, a pastime Casper wants no part of. For no good reason, he hangs around with a group of mean ghosts called the Ghostly Trio, who are totally into the whole jump-scare thing; Casper tries to convince them of the error of their ways.

It’s unclear what’s at stake for any of these characters. Casper’s philanthropy never extends as far as actually effecting change in his bucolic world. The other ghosts laugh with delight at startling people (and animals) but they don’t seem too broken up when foiled in their attempts. In the absence of plot, Casper floats (sometimes literally) from one scene to the next. Sometimes the stories have gags, sometimes they don’t. In one three-part story Casper tries to find another ghost who shares his milquetoast sensibilities. As if on cue, his cousin, Rubberhead, comes to visit. Casper is happy that two of them share a resemblance, but then Rubberhead uses his “power”—the ability to enlarge his head (?)—to scare a bouquet of flowers. One might think being picked would be enough to terrorize the blooms—not to mention kill them—but it’s the head trick that makes them shriek (?).

Throughout these stories, the only thing resembling motivation is the “bad” ghosts’ desire to scare; Casper, his pal Wendy, and everyone else seem content to wander from panel to panel, devoid of purpose or reflection. In general, the Harvey characters were defined by a single personality trait, with Casper being “good” and Richie being “rich” and Little Dot being “obsessed with dots.” This one-track characterization would eventually be brilliantly satirized by Dan Clowes in his story “Playful Obsession” (Eightball #5, 1992).

One story stuck out to me for its metatextuality. In this story, Casper and his bear cub companion become aware that they are fictional characters being drawn in a comic by the artist Pete Pencil, who expresses distaste for having to draw comics the way “Harvey” wants them drawn. In this story, Harvey is presented as an avuncular bespectacled man who hangs with forest creatures in his spare time, and he is summoned by Casper to re-assert order. But my heart goes out to Pete, who I can’t help but see as a stand-in for all the frustrated artists being paid a pittance to draw in the house style. Many cartoonists of the postwar era were immigrants or from immigrant families, and artists had to take whatever terms they were given.

There is stuff from childhood that can be revisited fruitfully as an adult, augmented by years of experience and sophistication: the books of E.B. White or Laura Ingalls Wilder, for a couple of obvious examples. Then there are those things (such as these comics) that upon examination are far less than what you remembered them being. They are the stories and characters that happened to be available when you were six, whose worlds and lore were magnified by your youthful enthusiasm. Harvey Comics were, in one sense, pretty terrible. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be read with enjoyment today. They offer a glimpse into a world of journeyman artists churning out gags for an audience of children not yet served by electronic media. They are also, as the Firesign Theatre would say, weird with a beard.