exploiting my youth – Page 3

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.

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.

April is the cruelest month

My Grandfather Cox scared me. He wasn’t an angry man, and he never threatened corporal punishment the way my other grandfather sometimes did. But he was a large and serious man. He was a Methodist minister and thought having a pack of cards in the house was an invitation to a life of debauchery. He spoke low, calmly, and infrequently about important things like religion and how not to waste your money on comic books. He and Grandmother Cox lived in a spare one-story house in rural Indiana with a long treeless lawn stretching to the country road. There was a drainage ditch along this road and at the end of the driveway a culvert made from four-foot aluminum pipe, ubiquitous in the Midwest.

My older brother, Rob, and I were staying with my Grandparents for a week in early spring. One morning we were sitting on the concrete front step with nothing to do—the absence of cards was only part of a more general ban on fun; the only diversions in the house being a bible trivia game and a dish of Kraft caramels. Grandfather Cox had been down by the edge of the road inspecting the ditch for some time and he abruptly strode with purpose towards the two of us. I had a sense of unease. Grandfather caught my gaze and brought his finger to his lips. Rob and I waited until he made his way to us and bent down. “Boys,” he whispered, “there’s a groundhog in the drainpipe. If you each go to a different end and are absolutely quiet you will see him there.”

I was confused. Rob and I both loved nature and watching animals (and sometimes catching them and bringing them home in pillowcases to the alarm of our mother), but groundhogs weren’t so special. In addition to being distrustful of fun, Grandfather Cox had never expressed any opinion about animals or the wonders of nature. But his eyes were twinkling and he seemed to be having a moment with us, and those were rare. So Rob and I walked very slowly to the edge of the road, covering the twenty or so yards in about two minutes.

We split to opposite sides of the gravel driveway and slid on our cutoffs down the brown dead sloping grass. I cautiously inched my head around the side of the pipe, ready at any moment for the beast to scamper out in terror, but as my angle of vision made its way down the pipe, there was nothing but dirty sediment. Finally I saw light at the other side, and Rob crouching in silhouette.

We stayed like that, staring for what felt like a very long time. Eventually, we stood up and walked back to the house, faster than before but still in silence. Grandfather was standing by the step as he had been the entire time, smiling with a look of benevolence bordering on grace.

“Grandpa,” I said, “there’s nothing there.”

“April Fool’s,” he said, without any particular inflection. And then he went inside.