A Song of Flights and Tights
To the surprise of literally nobody that knows me, I love comic books. Mainstream superhero fare, comic strips, indie books and zines, original graphic novels, manga; it is all fair game for me at this point. Growing up, the comic book industry and the tropes therein were always something to be admired from afar; I never anticipated working in or around that industry at all, any interaction would be purely as a fan. Life finds a way to change things up, of course, but before we get into all that (as I'm writing this intro, I don't even know if we'll get into all that this week), let's focus on how this fandom of mine all started.
In some capacity, superheroes were around as long as I could remember. My father had The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves on Betamax along with Superman: The Movie and Superman II on LaserDisc. It wasn't until years and years later that I discovered Christopher Reeve starred in two additional films as the Man of Steel and upon watching them, I immediately discovered why my dad didn't mention them at all. The other big hero in the Stone household was Batman (No real love for Marvel Comics superheroes) and my father similarly introduced me to the Adam West starring TV show from the 60s. Looking back, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Adam West really are the perfect figures to shepherd a young pre-K kid into the colorful world of North American superheroes embracing the escapist fun, morals (without being overly heavy-handed), and timeless Americana associated with the characters.
Superman, I generally regarded, as the greatest of the superheroes (I still do, really) but as I began elementary school, I started to hear buzz that the flagship DC Comics character was facing his imminent death at the hands of a relative newcomer, aptly named Doomsday. At that age, I still couldn’t really fathom Superman getting seriously hurt or failing much less dying so I had my dad take me out to the local comic shop (which even then seemed to be more focused on trading cards and action figures than actual comics) and picked up a copy of Superman #75. That issue, which I still have, has gone down in history as the death of Superman. If you’ve never read that issue, it’s entirely Superman and Doomsday beating each other to death with their bare hands. Clark dies in Lois Lane's arms while the Kents watch their adoptive son perish on national television. Pretty dark way to watch your hero fall. Especially if you're six.
I think what that taught me was that comics could be dangerous, in a way, but (Spoilers for a 20 year+ comic story) Superman of course comes back so everything is cyclical and eternal too. Comics were in a weird way in those days: Batman became crippled, Wonder Woman was corrupted, Green Lantern went insane, Spider-Man was maybe clone (Not even Marvel editorial was sure themselves at the time but that's a whole other story)? American comics had collectively jumped the shark and, by being exposed to the medium at level of ridiculousness, I think that made the more constant weirdness easier to stomach when things stabilized narratively again.
It wasn't all chaos confined to comic panels, though.
I was too young to watch the 1989 Batman flick starring Michael Keaton (My parents probably informed by my experiences watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Ghostbusters II as mentioned in a previous post) but, by 1992, they were cool with watching the animated series and Batman Returns. Of course, the irony is that Batman Returns is, to this day, the darkest, scariest Batman movie and I'm sure traumatized the shit out of me but I love that bizarrely macabre, German expressionist flick. And the animated Batman series is probably my favorite comic book adaptation ever, at once timeless yet current, somber yet fun.
By the time I was wrapping up elementary school, I was done with comics. The excesses had made the industry implode critically and commercially, Marvel filed for bankruptcy, and, you know, I wanted to talk to girls. I can say with relative confidence that going into detail about The Flash or Swamp Thing usually doesn't open up many avenues of romantic opportunity so I fell out of comics really for all of middle school and high school.
In my final month of high school, I skipped class one day to go watch Batman Begins. The entire film is a meditation on overcoming grief and channeling pain into something productive. It was a movie I really needed at that time and, to this day, I'm incredibly grateful I got it reflecting where I was personally at the time. I was first in line to pick up that flick when it was released on DVD four months later and it came with a small mini comic that included a selection of classic tales that influenced the script and tone of the film. One of those tales was a comic by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale called The Long Halloween.
The Long Halloween is a year long murder(s) mystery in Gotham City bookended by the titular October holiday. Tonally, it owed a lot to that animated series I grew up without compromising its more mature storytelling sensibilities and featured virtually all the major Batman villains depicted visually by Sale in their most garishly impressionist forms (The Joker's face almost entirely encapsulated in a rictus grin, Scarecrow a gaunt figure that appears literally made of straw, etc.). Most strikingly, the Dark Knight ultimately fails in this story or at least fails to see the larger game as the city he's sworn to protect descends into madness. It's grim, atmospheric, and I fell in love with it immediately.
From there, I was back into comics unrepentantly and really have been ever since eventually favoring indie and creator-owned books for the more conventional superhero fare. But I always remember how I got it into it all in the first place and if there's ever a mainstream book with a lot of buzz, I'll still check it out. Comics are like any other bit of art; it's the human condition refracted through a literary looking glass. And as much as I love straight up prose there is still, all these years later, something about words with pictures.
In some capacity, superheroes were around as long as I could remember. My father had The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves on Betamax along with Superman: The Movie and Superman II on LaserDisc. It wasn't until years and years later that I discovered Christopher Reeve starred in two additional films as the Man of Steel and upon watching them, I immediately discovered why my dad didn't mention them at all. The other big hero in the Stone household was Batman (No real love for Marvel Comics superheroes) and my father similarly introduced me to the Adam West starring TV show from the 60s. Looking back, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Adam West really are the perfect figures to shepherd a young pre-K kid into the colorful world of North American superheroes embracing the escapist fun, morals (without being overly heavy-handed), and timeless Americana associated with the characters.
Superman, I generally regarded, as the greatest of the superheroes (I still do, really) but as I began elementary school, I started to hear buzz that the flagship DC Comics character was facing his imminent death at the hands of a relative newcomer, aptly named Doomsday. At that age, I still couldn’t really fathom Superman getting seriously hurt or failing much less dying so I had my dad take me out to the local comic shop (which even then seemed to be more focused on trading cards and action figures than actual comics) and picked up a copy of Superman #75. That issue, which I still have, has gone down in history as the death of Superman. If you’ve never read that issue, it’s entirely Superman and Doomsday beating each other to death with their bare hands. Clark dies in Lois Lane's arms while the Kents watch their adoptive son perish on national television. Pretty dark way to watch your hero fall. Especially if you're six.
I think what that taught me was that comics could be dangerous, in a way, but (Spoilers for a 20 year+ comic story) Superman of course comes back so everything is cyclical and eternal too. Comics were in a weird way in those days: Batman became crippled, Wonder Woman was corrupted, Green Lantern went insane, Spider-Man was maybe clone (Not even Marvel editorial was sure themselves at the time but that's a whole other story)? American comics had collectively jumped the shark and, by being exposed to the medium at level of ridiculousness, I think that made the more constant weirdness easier to stomach when things stabilized narratively again.
It wasn't all chaos confined to comic panels, though.
I was too young to watch the 1989 Batman flick starring Michael Keaton (My parents probably informed by my experiences watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Ghostbusters II as mentioned in a previous post) but, by 1992, they were cool with watching the animated series and Batman Returns. Of course, the irony is that Batman Returns is, to this day, the darkest, scariest Batman movie and I'm sure traumatized the shit out of me but I love that bizarrely macabre, German expressionist flick. And the animated Batman series is probably my favorite comic book adaptation ever, at once timeless yet current, somber yet fun.
By the time I was wrapping up elementary school, I was done with comics. The excesses had made the industry implode critically and commercially, Marvel filed for bankruptcy, and, you know, I wanted to talk to girls. I can say with relative confidence that going into detail about The Flash or Swamp Thing usually doesn't open up many avenues of romantic opportunity so I fell out of comics really for all of middle school and high school.
In my final month of high school, I skipped class one day to go watch Batman Begins. The entire film is a meditation on overcoming grief and channeling pain into something productive. It was a movie I really needed at that time and, to this day, I'm incredibly grateful I got it reflecting where I was personally at the time. I was first in line to pick up that flick when it was released on DVD four months later and it came with a small mini comic that included a selection of classic tales that influenced the script and tone of the film. One of those tales was a comic by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale called The Long Halloween.
The Long Halloween is a year long murder(s) mystery in Gotham City bookended by the titular October holiday. Tonally, it owed a lot to that animated series I grew up without compromising its more mature storytelling sensibilities and featured virtually all the major Batman villains depicted visually by Sale in their most garishly impressionist forms (The Joker's face almost entirely encapsulated in a rictus grin, Scarecrow a gaunt figure that appears literally made of straw, etc.). Most strikingly, the Dark Knight ultimately fails in this story or at least fails to see the larger game as the city he's sworn to protect descends into madness. It's grim, atmospheric, and I fell in love with it immediately.
From there, I was back into comics unrepentantly and really have been ever since eventually favoring indie and creator-owned books for the more conventional superhero fare. But I always remember how I got it into it all in the first place and if there's ever a mainstream book with a lot of buzz, I'll still check it out. Comics are like any other bit of art; it's the human condition refracted through a literary looking glass. And as much as I love straight up prose there is still, all these years later, something about words with pictures.
