NOT THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Pic for the blog

A cousin H.o.p.’s age is now, after being a reluctant reader, making his way through the encyclopedia.

If H.o.p. was making his way through the encyclopedia, I’d be proud of him too. He’s not.

H.o.p. has instead discovered the joys of the comics and graphic novels alley of the second hand bookstore.

I mentioned comics to my sister. She showed me a comic she says her son enjoys, that teaches new words. I glanced at a couple of pages. Not really a comic. On each page is an after thought illustration introducing a new word and lots of text following on ways to use the new word.

H.o.p. would howl if I tried to introduce this to him as a comic. Even I recoiled and I didn’t want to recoil. I wanted to like it. A vocabulary builder!

People love Singapore Math and Singapore Science but H.o.p., from the age of five, refused to look at either. Why? Because he couldn’t stand the illustrations. Nearly every learning program to which we’ve introduced him has either failed or succeeded on the strength of its graphics, despite the fact he’s been sucked into crap like Neopets.

Marty took H.o.p. to Book Nook on Wednesday after his piano lesson (while I was waiting here for my parents) and introduced him to David Lindsay who was there. For years Marty enjoyed more being trashed by David Lindsay’s music reviews (when he was trashed) than the good reviews written by lesser talents. Lindsay knew what he was talking about, knew history, and was amusing.

We used to religiously visit Book Nook. The late night, winter stops were the best. Cold outside. Warm in. I’d sit on the floor, a tablet in hand with the numbers of comics I was missing from certain series, and start searching through everything used that had recently come in. This was before the internet and I even planned some trips to include stops at stores that were known for their comics inventories, determined to complete certain collections of mine.

Our interest in comics flagged to nothing eventually, for which reason we haven’t been frequenting Book Nook since before H.o.p. was born. But this looks like it’s about to change. H.o.p. came away from that Wednesday Book Nook excursion insisting on regular visits so he can sift for new issues. We let him in on the fact that we used to collect comics and have years of Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer and others packed away in boxes elsewhere. We promised we’d dig them up.

We’ve a lot of old alternative comics boxed away as well, but they’re too mature for him.

We located several of our old Silver Surfer graphic novels. They’re now on the table and H.o.p. is dancing happily around. “Yea! Yea!”

One reason I stopped reading comics was because of the explosion of steroidtastical physiques, the huge mammaries and the violence. We’d never been much interested in D.C. Comics, but then Marvel was changing how it was doing things. The X-Men had splintered into numerous series, too much to keep up with or spend money on. The Silver Surfer kept disappearing or dying, whatever. Artists we’d enjoyed such as John Buscema and Moebius were moved off series we appreciated also for the characters and story lines and into things in which we didn’t have much interest. Metropol, which we’d liked, was finished. Some of the alternative comic books we’d followed for quite some time had dried up (Mr. X was overrated but better than a lot of what was following and had some really fun art). First Comics had ceased publishing, and we’d read a good bit of their stuff. As far as I was concerned, Love and Rockets, which had been awesome, was pretty wrung out. Starting off with Mai, the Psychic Girl, after a couple years we had pretty well exhausted the manga that wasn’t rip-your-eyes-out gack gross and a huge turn off with the proclivity for sadistic sex involving females with underage faces. Confronting the outrageous muscles and glands on prominent Western commercial display and the gross out manga when I sat down to search through the stacks had gotten to be too much for me.

Marty reminds me that Pynchon seemed to have completely ripped off the story line from First Comic’s Whisper for his Vineland novel. I’d forgotten about that. When I was going through our books day before yesterday, rearranging some of the cases, I pulled out Vineland to look at again.

H.o.p. came home with a Silver Surfer issue and The Mice Templar. Marty had only glanced through them and missed all the violence in The Mice Templar, and I suppose he didn’t expect there to be much blood and gore in a mouse comic. But there it is.

“Yeah, it’s not Beatrix Potter,” H.o.p. had to say of it.

I looked around online and found however Mouse Guard, a comic which gets a good review and is described as not having the limb separations, and will order that…

Because H.o.p. is hooked, of course. Hooked on comics. For years he’s had an ancient Fantastic Four in his room that I’d not boxed up, that I left out for him, expecting that he’d one day be interested and wanting him to see one of the old greats first before diving into the new. I had intentionally boxed the rest, not just the mature comics, but all of them, because I had this feeling he’d fall into them wholly and didn’t want that happening when he was three, four, five, six, seven, eight years of age. I knew they’d be IT for him, but because of their themes, even the less intense ones, I didn’t want him stepping into that world until he was at least nine years of age. Which may sound odd, considering he’s been deep into animation for years.

Over the years, he returned to that Fantastic Four comic repeatedly, pulling it down from off his shelf like it’s a rare treasure, examining it like there’s something mysterious to be unraveled and brought to light. And I kept putting it on a higher shelf, staving off the inevitable.


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5 responses to “NOT THE ENCYCLOPEDIA”

  1. Jonathan Versen Avatar

    when I was about 12 my father gave me his old Encyclopedia Americana that his father bought him when he was growing up at around the same age– for some reason I didn’t find the encyclopedia itself very interesting but the yearly update books, which ran from about 1950 through ’61 or ’62, utterly fascinated me. I don’t know if I still have them, as I didn’t place such a great premium on holding on to things when I was 12.

    (maybe your kid might like Tintin?)

  2. Susan Och Avatar

    I think of most of the people I know as comic book superheroes, getting up each day and donning some sort of costumes and then going out into the world to fight the battle of good vs. evil, each with their own special powers.

    Some folks are well grounded in their superheroness and have honed their special powers well. Others spent their entire lives like Spiderman the morning after he got bit by the radioactive spider, walking around wondering “Why do I feel so different?” and “What’s wrong with me anyway?”

    The only “normal” people are the ones you don’t know very well. Comics remind me to stay focused on the big fight and to use my powers for good, not evil.

  3. Idyllopus Avatar

    Susan, I’m not in the least surprised that this is your approach to life.

  4. Idyllopus Avatar

    Jonathan, I don’t know if he’d like Tintin or not. Because of your mention, I am looking at Volume I of the hardcover collection and may purchase it for him.

  5. lavonne Avatar

    I encouraged my kid’s love of comics too — even took him to Comic-Con here in San Diego every year. I don’t know why I thought he’d outgrow it. Now he’s almost 20, working at the supermarket across the street, and dreaming of writing and drawing his own comic books while all his friends are sophomores in college. At least his taste has matured. He’s very much into graphic novels now.

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