Thursday, August 8, 2019

My comic childhood


I had only a passing interest in comic books, so I suppose I was not like other boys my age.  I was born into the first half of what is considered the Silver Age of comics.  These days video games have taken up the mantle as the Vandal-king of distraction, but in my day it was comic books.  My mother had read to me as a child, so I found the small bubbles of text in a comic book insufficient to fulfil the complexities of character that I was used to in books.  Still, the comics were around, and always having been visual, I was drawn to them.  What particularly fascinated me were the advertisements for incredible childhood bargains: smoke bombs, onion gum, and x-ray specs, all at ridiculously low (well, allowance affordable) prices.

I had a high interest in my best friend's dad.  Art had the furriest chest I had ever seen (not that I had seen many before the age of ten) and I was transfixed by it.  In summer we would swim, and I could count on Art to make a stirrup with his interlocked fingers and launch us high into the air one after the other.

Finally one day, years before my tenth birthday, I screwed up my courage and asked my mother to help me send away for the x-ray specs. I lied by telling her that I wanted a pair for a school project.  I couldn't dare tell her the real reason I wanted them.  I had no idea how to obtain the stamp I needed in order to send away for the glasses.  We lived on a farm and the nearest post office was in the city, a car ride away.  She asked me to bring her the comic book.  I opened the page to the advertisements.  Even at that age I was aware of the lurid cheapness of it, and the level of intelligence it pandered to.  It made my mother rankle.  She had always assumed me to be better than I was.  Ordering x-ray specs for her son was clearly beneath her.  Quickly scanning the order form, she found a way out ..

Reader, I have to stop you here for a second and present a series of reflections held by me at the time.  My family has cousins in the United States, and visiting them always left a dazzling impression on me.  It was a land of air conditioning and ice cream trucks and dozens of television channels.  But order forms in comics often asked for 'State’ and 'Zip’.  Canada is a land of provinces and postal codes.

.. My mother pointed to the corner of the order form and my heart sank.  In my small world it was impossible to reconcile where I lived with an order form that did not match reality.  I never got the specs and only saw Art one other time with his shirt off  - and it wasn't for a swim.

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