Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Starting in Comics - Part 1 At the age of about six, I was heavily into reading and collecting comics. The exploits of super heroes, Superman, Captain Marvel, thrilled me. I was particularly into oddball super heroes like the Green Lama, who had powers you didn’t run into everyday. As time went on though, my attitude toward comics changes. I remember getting tired of the cliché ridden, formulaic stories I ran into so often in action and adventure comics. I started to appreciate more the Captain Marvel comics, which were more humorous. In general though, the unsophisticated level of writing in comics bothered me more and more, and I eventually got tired of just about every one, except “Mad”, whose fresh satire was aimed at bright high school students. In 1962 Robert Crumb moved from Philadelphia to Cleveland into an apartment right around the corner from me. He was about nineteen at the time and I was twenty-three. We were initially drawn together due to our mutual interest in jazz, but soon began to dig the new, alternative stories he was working on. After reading them, it gradually dawned on me that comics were not an intrinsically limited art form. Indeed, comics had no limitations. They were words and pictures and you could do anything with word and pictures. You could use any words in the dictionary, arranged in any order you liked. And you could use a vast array of illustration styles in comics. Crumb got a job as an illustrator for Cleveland’s American Greeting Card Company and remained a resident of my neighborhood for four years. During that time, I followed the evolution of his alternative comic book stories closely, and although more interested in jazz—I’d been writing jazz criticism for nationally distributed magazines since 1959--continued to theorize about how comics could be used in more expanded ways aimed at adults. [More about this later.] 9:32:37 AM