In Praise of Comic Books

By Ed Smallwood

Free Comic Book Day came and went yesterday without much comment from me, excepting a brief mention in a recent blog entry. I actually do consider this an important day of the year. This day may not be as important as paying attention to our parents, or remembering our veterans, or remembering the achievements and suffering of Union members, but it is in fact the only day backed by industry that helps with literacy. Think about that for a minute. One day a year you can get a free book. It may not be the latest Stephen King book, but that may not be a bad thing.

Comic books have been maligned in our culture for a long time, often as the lowest form of entertainment--probably because they have historically been produced on the cheap. While this can still be true today, it is more often the case for the major publishers that comic books are very well produced and literate popular culture magazines.

Every week I have been trying to write at least one, and often two, complete essays. This takes me as little as 4 hours and as much as 40 hours per essay in research and editing, which is one of the reasons I like to republish my “Brown-bagging as gas saving measure” essay. I can put in an hour or less of research and bring it right back up-to-date. Now, considering the work I put into one essay, I’m trying to imagine putting in a similar amount of work to produce a work of fiction writing. Now throw in 32 pages of drawings, all of them inked and shaded. I know I would find that amount of work to be staggering.

It really is no surprise that so many of the better comic books are being produced as movies. One of the first things that most movie producers and directors do is commission a set of story boards to visualize the movie, and really story boards are so similar to a comic book it really doesn’t make sense to put them in different categories.

While it is difficult to disapprove of the artistic merits of a comic, many people are unimpressed with the basic literary narrative value of them. When I was very young, I loved comics, almost any kind I could get my hands on. As I got older I moved on to novels, magazines, and newspapers. I began to believe that comics were strictly for children and the immature. I was humbled several months back when a co-worker loaned me the trade-paperback copy of several volumes of Marvel’s Civil War series of comics. In this series, the U.S. Congress passes a law making it illegal for superheroes to keep their identity secret. One group, led by Tony Stark (Iron Man) follows the law and starts hunting down superheroes who refuse to follow the law. A second group, led by Captain America refuses to follow the law.

At one point early in the series, Spider Man asks Captain America why he is fighting the law when everyone is aware of his real identity, and Captain America quotes from an essay by Mark Twain that I was not even aware of. I was so impressed by the relevancy of the excerpt, placed in a comic book in an alternate universe where nobody would notice it, that I had to look into it further. It took hours of work, but I managed to find a longer excerpt at a website called "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Nachos" (you can find it online at http://studiodave.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html.) I am reprinting here the passage from that website until I can find a longer version.

Here it is:

Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object — robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way.

What caused the change? Merely a politician's trick — a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag.

And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor — none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

For in a republic, who is "the Country"? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is "the country?" Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn't.

In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country — hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

This Republic's life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands.

It becomes difficult at best to impugn the literacy of comics when you have that kind of content.

It is for these and other reasons that I heartily recommend that next year you take time to celebrate Free Comic Book Day. I am nearly certain that you will not be able to visit a Hallmark Store and get a free card any day this year, and even if you can, it is unlikely to have the same literary impact, or be as relevant to our current political situation, as that one passage above. And who knows, you may even enjoy the free book.

But then, why wait a year?

Special Earth Day Post

By Ed Smallwood

I promised after MLK Day that I would attempt to be more topical; that I would attempt to remember special days more often. This Special Earth Day edition is my first attempt to do so. Look for my Special Free Comic Book Day Edition next month (the joke is: I’m not joking.) Rest assured that this Tuesday (the actual Earth Day) I will return to my usual purely political rantings.

All humor aside, Earth Day used to be really important when I was younger. It was supposed to bring attention to environmental issues, hopefully so we could do something about it before it was too late. Somehow in the last decade or so, it has become almost irrelevant. We have allowed it to disappear and today I am wondering: “Why?”

It certainly isn’t because we don’t need it. I’m sure many holidays have disappeared because they outlived their usefulness. Earth Day can hardly be considered to be one of those.

It can’t be because nobody is concerned about the environment. I have a hard time turning on a newscast without something being mentioned about Global Warming or Carbon Emissions, even if something much more important is happening, like The Pope marrying Britney Spears and Robert Downey Jr. while paparazzi have a shootout over the rights to crash into their limo before they disappear permanently from a Dutch colony.

Is it because we have Republicans in the White House? I doubt that would be the cause. Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, under the Nixon administration.

So what could the cause be? Is it because we’re so concerned about the environment all the time that having a special day to raise awareness is unnecessary? I would like to think so, but I doubt it.

Actually, I believe that we have never had as urgent a need for Earth Day as we do now. If we use it to it’s fullest, we should be going to Earth Day celebrations and using that time to network, to start to apply more pressure on our legislators to take the environment much more seriously than we have in the past several years.

Under the current administration, environmental regulations have been loosened, at a time when they are becoming more important. California has petitioned the EPA for a variance that would allow the state to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars the way they do other smog producing emissions. First the EPA stated that they had no authority to do so, and after California sued them in the Supreme Court, and the Court told the EPA that they do indeed have that authority, the EPA has decided to ignore California’s request on the assumption that they actually don’t have to pay attention to the most populous state in the Union.

The President first stated that he didn’t believe that global warming was happening. He later changed his stance to the idea that it was a natural event that we didn’t have to worry about. He has recently changed his mind again to agree that it is human caused, but his solution to the problem hasn’t changed much: Let polluters trade Carbon Credits. This would allow some polluters to put out much more carbon dioxide than they do now, under the assumption that others would put out less. This is a non-solution.

My gut feeling at this point is that we have a much bigger problem with global warming than we realize; that it is much further along than we have been told by a media that doesn’t understand the problem. The main evidence, and problem, that I can point to is that the permafrost is melting. This may not sound important, but it is huge. The permafrost is the land area starting around the Arctic Circle and going north of there. This is land that has been frozen solid essentially since the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago. Think about that for a bit. Many of the things that live in that part of the world that have died over tens of thousands of years were left in a frozen state. It is a giant ice-box, storing tens of thousands of years of leftovers. Now, it’s on a defrost cycle. Think of what happens to the food in your freezer when you have a week-long power outage.

Now think of all of the grasses, rats, mammoths, and other now-dead things rotting and releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere. Over 10,000 years worth. That could easily amount to much more greenhouse gas than our entire civilization has ever released.

Considering how long carbon dioxide stays in the air (about 30 years on average,) my feeling is that we would have needed to go carbon neutral 20 or more years ago to prevent our current situation.

Now that I’ve scared the bajeezus out of you, we can still fix this. We have time. The temperature is not going up too quickly yet, however we do need to get on top of this problem as quickly as possible. I keep hearing people saying that we need a World War II type mobilization to fix this problem, and I think they have something there. It is possible, and things like this have been done in the past.

So let’s use Earth Day this year to start this mobilization. Go over to the Earth Policy Institute and purchase at least one copy, preferably several more, of the book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown. This book has the best roadmap of what needs to be done in my opinion. After reading it, you will want to lend it out. Trust me on this—virtually everyone I know that bought a copy of the last edition of the book bought at least one other for someone else. Next, Contact your Representative in Congress to let them know you are paying attention, and remember their reaction this November. You can also buy them a copy of Plan B 3.0 (the more you buy, the better the price gets.) And don’t forget to vote this November.