Losers, Chicks, and Secret Identities – Part One (first published in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review
COLLEGE
It was dread. Social disaster was what I was facing if my secret ever got out. Few people would understand my dilemma. Almost nobody knew about this disreputable passion, because I was very good at hiding it, but it was always there in the background. My comic book collection was my very own treasure horde, and I locked it away like an art collector. This was not about covetous hands; the real fear lay in letting people know that I identified with this passion in the first place. The only instances when I voluntarily exposed my hidden love for comics outside the walls of my home was every time I entered a comic book store to get something fundamental in me fulfilled.
You sacrificed some semblance of self as a comic book fan back in the day. You were an outsider, some kind of weirdo. Looking around at the monstrous success garnered by the industry today, you would at least think it unlikely. My wife thinks I’m exaggerating when I declare that in those days, we comic book fans had to hide. We, the unprofessed and reluctant “geeks,” would keep that stuff in a distant corner of our lives, unknowingly leading the secret identity you read about in the actual comic books we were collecting. Superheroes were all about secret identities, and when Spiderman changed back to the nerdy Peter Parker, it was a leap across fantasy and straight into the reality of almost every fan that was reading such stuff.
We call them geeks now, but it was far more universal back then to call such people losers. And I was no loser. The such and such person that I thought of myself was nothing like the type that yearned for the art and stories and that carefully collected these flimsy things in bags in order to preserve their condition. I looked at myself as a tough guy, the quiet type. A loner whose mysterious qualities eventually had the ability to attract girls — if they ever got close enough. These were the things I had to tell myself for me to get as far away from that other world as possible.
The occasions when I had to enter the neighborhood comic book store certainly came with mixed feelings. What got me most uncomfortable was getting out of my mom’s car and showing any prospective passerby that I was entering a comic book store. Sunny Comics was a couple of miles from my house, and the real reason I didn’t go all that much was that I didn’t have enough money. The hardcore fans would dump all their money into this hobby, which meant they spent it on nothing else, unwittingly wearing the same T-shirts and jeans through most of their young adult lives. This hobby needed certain amounts of purchasing power, because beyond the flimsy magazine-style comics, nothing was cheap, and I was lucky if I had pocket change for this or for anything else. And this picture of the man without money would have amounted to another characteristic of a loser in the decade of the 1980s.
Sunny Comics! How to describe this place? The store itself was unpleasant with its dusty disorderliness and funky smell, and it gave negative appeal to staying longer than you needed. But that did not deter me; stay longer I did. For an hour or more, I would bask in the wonders you could find nowhere else. The comic book store was the only place to find such rarities, designer toys and art books in limited print runs, graphic novels that you had no idea existed. I would recognize an artist’s style or characters on the cover, and that was all I needed. And that was all I was going to get, because the cover was the only thing on display. Every book and comic magazine came in a plastic bag sealed with tape, and I was not the type to open one and risk a sharp retort from the register. Outside the regular monthly comic books I’d buy, every purchase was a gamble; you either got something incredible or something not so great.
The store was run by a family that allowed lounging floorspace for their several dogs. The dogs were so quiet, you sometimes stepped on a paw before you noticed it was there. The family appeared as if running this store were a drudgery, and any questions directed at them would be met with the same stare of weary indignation.
The old lady in charge had that one expression permanently stamped on her face, but at least she was pretty knowledgable. She always knew what was coming, when, and by whom. There was the day the industry came to a sudden halt — nothing was on the shelves! I slowly made my way to the counter and politely got her attention in order to ask her why. Before I said a word, she was already explaining that an entire month’s worth of issues was delayed because of a fire that had wrecked the color separation sweatshop where almost all the publishers did their business. I think I was shocked, and I might have told her it was shocking, or something like that, just to say something. But I wasn’t adding it up until later. One fire could wreck everything I looked forward to! And her information eventually gave me a twisted glimpse at the incestuous relationships these publishing competitors actually enjoyed. All of them used the same color separator, and thus all of them were late with their titles that one summer.
Another characteristic of a loser was a lack of friends. I liked to believe I knew a lot of people, but who were the people I actually felt close to? And how many of these people were into comics?
I did hang out in those days with a college friend on campus who was a diehard fan. He talked the lingo, and it was cool to have someone who understood the ins and outs of these incredible stories. The problem with Gabriel was that he had no sense of propriety. There’s a certain time and place to bring this subject up, and he didn’t get it. Like me, Gabriel was a Cuban kid, sort of a cross between a dork and a lawyer at the golf course with his clean haircut and glasses. That problem of his was he had that temerity that lived in so few of us to talk about comics in front of anybody, anywhere. He wanted to chat about it in classrooms and halls, talking about the storylines and the art. He would do all the talking, and I would take furtive glances around me to see if anyone I knew were anywhere near our vicinity.
I knew better than to come out with this hobby in plain view of a society that scorned it. Though I loved this fake, plastic world that I concocted around me with the help of cues from action figures and the inspiration of comic books, I was never stupid enough to advertise it. It was a guilty love, much like that kind you might have for someone who you were simultaneously ashamed of, like a stupid-looking chum or a girl you liked that everybody thought was ugly.
Gabriel and I, one day, were sitting with a group of his friends in that hangout spot that every two-year college seems to have, and there were about three or four attractive girls present. I didn’t know them. They were people he knew. They were all done up in their shopping mall attire, and for this one brief moment, I was in a social circle with hot chicks! They were snickering at some other girl walking by in leg warmers and high heels; the fashion faux pas that poor girl had committed was lost on me but it was obvious to every offended lady at the table. And this is the setting that Gabriel chose to bring up Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and the rest of the X-Men.
I was struck with the likelihood that my own secret identity, even among these strangers, was going to be compromised. My tough guy public persona was on the verge of collapsing. I was frozen on the spot, training my eyes solely on Gabriel, trying not to look at the group reaction to this ludicrous conversation. To my horror, one of the hot girls turned to us and asked us who Kitty Pryde was, wondering if we were gossiping about soap operas. My friend looked at her with his wry smile and said, “Something like that.”
What the hell was wrong with him! What if she put two and two together? Didn’t he know chicks don’t dig comics?
No, chicks didn’t dig comics. But if I thought about it for a second, what the hell did I know about chicks? And wasn’t he the one with all these female friends in the first place? I wasn’t adding it up back then, but maybe Gabriel didn’t want to give in to a double life. He might have been the type to have backbone, the kind of person that really didn’t care what others thought of him. Commendable, I think, especially now when I look back on it all. I could have taken some pointers from him, but if I were honest — I didn’t have the balls.
I didn’t know anybody like Gabriel. I only knew one other guy at school with the same interests who had the good sense to keep it to himself like I did. The only time Eddie Castro and I would talk about these matters was at the bus stop in front of campus in lowered voices, with no one around. Like spies, we would mutter about the John Byrne years doing the X-Men or scratch our heads at Frank Miller’s deviation to a sketchy drawing style in that Batman graphic novel that was in all the actual bookstores. Eddie also knew Gabriel, but I don’t think he knew him very well. I may have introduced them for all I remember. He had the same reactions to him that I had, awed by how Gabriel could bring up the superhero names and their powers in public, along with the rest of the alphabet of superhero trivia without flinching, making the alter egos that sounded so very cool as you were reading their exploits with your inner voice seem so ridiculous out in the stratosphere of aspirated syllables and actual reality. Shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders, Eddie would say, “Gabriel is cool and shit, but he just doesn’t get it. I’m like I love talking about Spiderman and Wolverine,” and Eddie would point to the ground and say, “but not right now, man.”
That two-year college was the center of my life for both those years. I hardly had a friend (a real friend), and I barely knew a single girl, but I had high hopes anyway. And it was no accident that as an art student, I was learning more at the college about the history of comics than about the art of the Renaissance. Between classes I would spend an hour at the campus library, sneaking around the shelves, looking for anything that looked interesting — autobiographies that read like novels, how-to books on making movies. One day, I found large books that depicted the history of comics. I didn’t even know comics had a history! I took them home. I was curious about the old art of these newspaper strips and early comic books. Could this musty, old work be any good? A lot of it was rubbery-looking or scratchy. But I found some interesting work that made me pause to think about possibilities in art and stories. These history books were forming ideas in my head. They created a fresh interest in antiquated comic strips from before World War II.
It was not just about the art these books would sample generously in their pages. It was what was said about the work. The writers of these books seemed to be propounding a level of importance and seriousness that I found fascinating. One of these books even equated comics with jazz, claiming that they were the only two true American art forms. These allusions and comparisons armed me with enough tidbits to help me argue the point that comics were indeed important. Now that I knew that comic books should be defended, I embraced the crusade needed to inform the public that this was a valid art form, and I would go on and on about them, even if my audience were limited to close family and one or two friends.
If a comics history book elaborated on the salacious work in the underground comics from the Sixties, I would defend the position why comics had the right to print whatever they liked, promoting the idea that it was in our best interests to allow comics to show naked women, for example. The truth, as I could see it, was that the very best comics — the ones that exhibited the most superlative craft and content — were intended for mature audiences anyway, and that meant that it usually came with naked women. But like I said, my sermons had a limited circulation, and even if it extended beyond the handful of people I harried with these ideas, my powers of argumentative reasoning were underdeveloped.
Regardless, those books opened up my world in ways I was not even aware of. Their hold on me was unforgettable, though I was not too keen on the tone and syntax these writers had to take. And that was the one thing that confused me about these wonderful history books on our American art form. Though I was not going to question the gravity behind those aficionados who would write their introductions and essays on comics with the same sobriety, if not the same verbal manner, as scholars and serious-minded people, it all sounded kind of pretentious. It was something I never dwelt on, but I must have reflected on it once or twice why these “comics historians” would attempt such an academic position on this, their favorite subject.
Not for one minute did I complain about such intellectual diversions with the subject, and actually that seriousness was feeding my own outlook on how the medium was an art form of the very highest order. Nevertheless, these sophisticated forays were making me think of the art history classes and the slide shows and the anecdotes about which fresco painters pissed off which bishops when plopping their painterly messes onto scaffolding and floor.
Was it the same thing? I didn’t think so. I had a lot more love for the art in comics than anything European or religious. In the company of other comic book lovers, I would flagrantly say that Michael Golden was a much better artist than Michelangelo. And my colleague and fellow comic book collector would be like, “Are you crazy!” gasping at such words, because they knew where to draw the line, it seemed, and I was one of those fanatics when I was inspired and inside closed doors, well-hidden and protected from the public, from the outsider opinion, from the real barbarians! In such opportunities, I would tell it as it is! Then, my colleague’s subsequent argument would be that Michelangelo was the very first superhero artist, and he would make links to how Michelangelo informed heroic proportions, how the figure of God was the template for Captain America, and the power and the muscles and all that, but I wasn’t buying it.
It was that scholarly interest that was crossing the fun and personal with that institution of learning subjects such as fine arts, which had apparently been gathering their steam for hundreds of years just to be able to present their slides, anecdotes, and kernels of knowledge to a largely dumb and uninterested audience of youngish students. “Institution” is a good word; it was the institution versus the personal joy.
But that didn’t bother me either. It wasn’t that. Actually, I don’t think anything about their introductions to handsome editions and their argumentative articles about the importance of this work even so much as knotted my brow. But it somehow felt off, as if they were doing something wrong, committing something to be ashamed of, and I was there implicating myself because I was reading it — and believing it!
I am thinking of one of these people, Bill Blackbeard, and the name alone conveyed a certain eccentricity behind the personage — I thought it was a pseudonym. It turned out to be a real name. My first meeting with that name came in the foreword of a hardcover book I felt compelled to buy at Sunny Comics. It was the third volume of the complete Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff. Before entering college, I had never heard of Terry and the Pirates, but one of those library books enlightened me about the greatness of this old adventure strip from the 1930s and 40s. Basically, a young American and his ward were having adventures around the war-torn landscape of divided China. This theme was strange to me. Why China? Were all of their adventures set just there? The setting, the absurd title all lent it an idiosyncratic air. Hardcover compilations were coming out in those days. Sunny Comics had some of them. They were $32.50 plus tax, during a time when the saddle-stitched flimsy comics were going for 75 cents. Like I mentioned, I hardly had money for the regular comics, so this money in 1987 for a striving college student was nothing less than grave. But I bought it anyway. In the foreword, Blackbeard goes on about the origins of adventure strips and such stuff.
Apparently, this Bill Blackbeard was important within the right comic strip circles, given how his thoughts prefaced the hardcover I now had. I thought he was an editor or a publisher. It turned out that he was an avid collector of newspaper strips, and when most people were using old newspapers to pad boxes or to roll fish up in, he was carefully clipping the comics sections so that posterity could have a peek at them — so that the artists of that day could have their work somehow preserved. Something I was not aware of was that almost all of the original art had been thrown out because the actual drawings themselves — the sheets of Bristol board that held the India ink drawings — were considered obsolete once printed! It was only in the fugitive newsprint that these gems were saved from vanishing. How else to compile a full story run of a given strip? Someone had to clip them from their printed sources.
Blackbeard was a collector just like me, except he was a man with a mission, and instead of a loser, or a dweeb with a lot of time on his hands, he was considered an “archivist” whose private collections were being published.
Over the years, I would keep running into the name. When I moved to San Francisco, I learned Blackbeard was associated with the Cartoon Museum there. I would encounter interviews of his and slowly acknowledge his inestimable worth to the existence of this work — this work that nobody else cared about, that he single-handedly preserved by going to the libraries at a pivotal time in their history. When microfiche was becoming all the rage and libraries were photographing their periodical collections and then throwing away the originals, it was Bill Blackbeard who came in at the nick of time to save them from destruction! Essentially, if it weren’t for him, I would never have been able to read Terry and the Pirates.
Today, when I read large books detailing the biographies of great cartoonists such as Milton Caniff, I pick up the importance of cartoon scholars and what they have done, and I don’t think twice about it. It helps that the art of the comics is far more respected as a cultural property today than it ever was before. Comic strips may have had their heyday a long time ago, and the comic book industry has progressively shrunk, but today there is more in-depth appreciation for this medium. People are coming out of the woodwork professing they are comic book fans. Even if the industry is shrinking, the present-day creators are getting more money and respect than ever before. The comic book conventions have become such giant events (thanks largely to the movies and video games associated with comic book properties), they are even outgrowing their host cities. If today, you say I like comics, you are considered cool, and there are also more and more ladies getting into them. I would never have seen any of this coming in a hundred years. In my world, it was as impossible as wishing away the nuclear missiles.
— Rey Armenteros