One of the things that turned me into a reader was comic books and cartoons - though those who know me these days might find that hard to believe. I was not a big reader before the age of 12 and what I did read almost always had pictures: pages full of text and nothing else were uninteresting to me. I wasn't a bad reader - anything but! I was the best reader in my class and was reading at the college level by the time I was eight. I just didn't find reading interesting. If I read, it was a comic book from the 10 cent comic book rack at the now long gone Groton Pharmacy, across the street from the old Bureau of Groton Post Office. I remember the terrible day that comics went up in price to 12 cents!
As a kid, I used to wait impatiently for the monthly delivery of Children's Digest in the mail. Inside that venerable publication was the monthly installment of Tintin by Herge. Tintin was my introduction to the world beyond the stagnant American comics venue. In Belgium and France, graphic novel offerings like Tintin are known as Bandes Designees. Just about the whole world knows that graphic novels and graphic stories in Japan are called manga. It's only here in the United States and Canada that we are stuck with the names "comic books" or "comics" for things that are better termed sequential art or graphic stories.
So here we are, two decades into a quiet revolution of graphic story telling, in large part fueled by the breakthrough of Japanese manga and anime into American culture. The current mostly young male and female audience of mange and anime will be the first American generation to recognize that the scope of comics is huge and covers all of life. And yet, we still seem to be saddled with literary critics and scholars who just don't get it. Many of these literary pundits still think that comics are for not-too-bright junior high school boys interested in only superheroes wearing skin-tight tights and female supergirls in tighter tights with impossibly round and unsagging boobs...
Why does the "death" of a Marvel or DC comic book hero make front page news - like the recent demise of Captain America - but that most Americans have never even heard of the world's most popular "comic book," the manga called Naruto? I think that part of the answer has to do with what passes for "news" these days. I guess Captain America must be more news worthy than things like the increasing shortages of raw material commodities or the demise of small manufacturing businesses in Italy - but the media types know they will lose their advertisers to the competition if they report too much "boring" news and not enough "human interest" stories. Certainly no journalist in America is going to report on major literary trends in another country, especially in a genre that's considered the purview of pimply adolescent boys. I find it disturbing that the news media really do have the power to shape public opinion in this manner. Perhaps the news worthiness of Captain America stems from the belief that American icons still define world culture, a comfortable stance that speaks of our continuing inability to admit that the world doesn't love us anymore.
The world of the graphic story is immense. Anyone who has kids these days probably has encountered the tour-de-force of Japanese manga and anime. What we are missing, however, is the breadth of Japanese manga as a literary phenomenon. There are manga for little kids, for adolescent girls, adolescent boys, and adults. It seems to be a continuing and very annoying theme that when you mention adult manga in this country, the news types inevitably jump on the non-representative and trivializing happenstance that some of that adult manga literature is pornographic in both depiction and intent. I'm going to resist the temptation to trash our journalism professionals any further - so I will rant no more about the proclivity of the press to report on the most crass, trivial and irrelevant characteristics of any news item they find. The world of adult manga covers classic stories like Barefoot Gen, an eyewitness account of Hiroshima; great modern graphic novels like Adolf, a story of Japan, Germany and Jews during WWII; and new works like Deathnote whose protagonist is a anti-hero mass murderer. Comic book porn, however, will always make "good copy" on any news program or radio broadcast, regardless of the merits of other (non-pornographic) adult manga.
Frankly, the drugged up and pornographic character of your typical National Lampoon comic strip or 60s underground comic book is old news in this country and has been since at least the early 70s. American underground comics are probably Ph.D. fodder at this point since they capture a snapshot of the now long-gone hippie era. The taboos these comics broke seemed like a big deal at the time; however, since then we have gotten used to literature and movies that depict sexual acts and doing drugs regardless of our approbation or lack thereof. Back then, the reaction of "The Establishment" to these comics was due in part to the expectation of comic book self-censorship. What gets to me is the mind-set which still assumes American comics should follow the self-censorship of the 50s comic book code and that the target audience for comic books will always be adolescent boys.
Because of these ingrained American attitudes toward comics, there have been some major works that have never received the critical acclaim they deserve, like Will Eisner's Contract with God, The Invisibles, the Jane Grey storyline of 1978-1980 in Marvel's X-Men and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four stories. Why is it that the literary savants of this country can only take an American graphic novel seriously if it deals with big, socially-valued events, like one family's story of surviving the Holocaust in the Pulitzer-prize winning Maus? Our graphic story-telling legacy is far greater and much richer than just Superman or Spiderman. Recognizing this is more than overdue.
When is the literary establishment of this country going to wake up and admit that something like Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is a major work of 20th century literature?
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