Comic Appreciation
I make no bones about my feelings on video games: evil stuff. Even though their sanctioning body has backed off (for now) for labeling them addictive, the fact remains that psychologists say there is evidence that one in three kids who play video games undergo the same changes in brain chemistry as a narcotics addiction. Imagine if you're a parent who isn't aware of this and you bring a shiny new console into your house. You could very well be hooking your kids on a device that could dominate significant areas of their lives. Surely that could not be their intent.
I asked our college student babysitter if she'd ever dated a video game playing guy. She said once. And it would stay that way. She confirmed the sense I have that while it may be tragic to bring these things into the lives of your children, it's pathetic when it still has a hold on a college age (and beyond) man.
When I was a kid, the first Atari games were coming out, you know, Pong and the one where you shoot the light pistol at the TV screen. My dad would let us play a handful of times when we were at one of his friends' houses but was adamant that a machine like that would never cross the threshold of our family room. Good man.
So what's a kid to do? I found my high in comic books. I remember going into Salk Drugs one day on 54th and Lyndale in Minneapolis. In the back toward the pharmacy counter was a wire rack crammed full of the comics of the day. For some reason they seemed to be mostly Marvel and I've been a Marvel-Boy ever since. I picked out an issue of the Avengers, number 102 I think, with the Vision and the Grim Reaper squaring off on the cover.
Ohmigod, the art, the colors, the characters! The Avengers name alone was dark and dangerous, especially since I had only a vague idea of what it meant. I had no idea what was going on but aside from the Vision there was the Scarlet Witch, whose powers it took years for me to understand, her brother Quicksilver, and the rest of the team. Giant robot creations called Sentinels flew down and took the two away, flying then into the air to some far off lair.
I had no idea what had happened. I had no idea who or what the Vision was (an android created by Ultron to destroy the Avengers but who ultimately joined the team instead). He had a relationship to the villainous Grim Reaper and a long dead hero called Wonder Man that again took me years to figure out. Who had created the Sentinels? Why were they collecting all of the mutant super heroes and where were they taking them? What was a mutant?
My head was spinning. Best twenty cents I ever spent. Comics of the time, or more importantly, the sense of wonder and excitement that they gave me, have stayed with me and influenced me my entire life. Like girls watching super models, the heroes became my role models. And the language play that I learned, the terms and concepts that I never would have been exposed to otherwise, have all stayed with me to this day.
Perhaps the saddest part of my childhood came when my parents thought I was reading too many (reading too much!) and put a moratorium on my not so secret life. For a time I was miserable until I convinced them that by abandoning all my favorite titles in the middle of ongoing story arcs I had wasted a bunch of money. They agreed to reinstate me on a limited basis, followed by another ban (I remember that moment: in an effort to interest my brother, I made a comment based on a Marvel Team-Up with Spider-Man and the Human Torch, about how they were fighting Morbius, a vampire; I made it sound like the title was not part of an ongoing arc (and it wasn't) and the hammer fell again). But then slowly I crept back into the collecting fold and they wisely decided not to challenge it.
Sounds a bit like an addiction to me. Unlike video games, though, I think reading anything is more productive and beneficial than playing those games. You learn vocabulary and language usage; you're exposed to human behaviors, some noble and others deserving of super hero intervention; you can appreciate the art, the figures, the personalities: in short, your imagination can be stimulated to heights otherwise unachievable to non-literate adolescents. I never spent time reading comic books and then looked back and said, damn, I just threw away hours of my life. And I've done that with video games and watching late night movies on HBO.
My kids will read. If it's comic books that interest them, they can have them without restriction. We have a set of Harry Potter books on order, and I've got the first nine Three Investigators books by Robert Arthur just waiting for my boy to start reading. I saw an Encyclopedia Brown book in the store two days ago and I remember how my father could ALWAYS figure out the mysteries and how every third or fourth one that I could solve made me feel absolutely exhilarated. I think comics can do for them what they did for me, bring me into a world of books and learning and knowledge.
And wonder. Open eyed excitement. How else would they get those incredible feelings? It's not going to happen by sitting in front of a television or a computer monitor. They need to engage their imaginations and if there's a better way to do it, I don't know what it is.
I asked our college student babysitter if she'd ever dated a video game playing guy. She said once. And it would stay that way. She confirmed the sense I have that while it may be tragic to bring these things into the lives of your children, it's pathetic when it still has a hold on a college age (and beyond) man.
When I was a kid, the first Atari games were coming out, you know, Pong and the one where you shoot the light pistol at the TV screen. My dad would let us play a handful of times when we were at one of his friends' houses but was adamant that a machine like that would never cross the threshold of our family room. Good man.
So what's a kid to do? I found my high in comic books. I remember going into Salk Drugs one day on 54th and Lyndale in Minneapolis. In the back toward the pharmacy counter was a wire rack crammed full of the comics of the day. For some reason they seemed to be mostly Marvel and I've been a Marvel-Boy ever since. I picked out an issue of the Avengers, number 102 I think, with the Vision and the Grim Reaper squaring off on the cover.
Ohmigod, the art, the colors, the characters! The Avengers name alone was dark and dangerous, especially since I had only a vague idea of what it meant. I had no idea what was going on but aside from the Vision there was the Scarlet Witch, whose powers it took years for me to understand, her brother Quicksilver, and the rest of the team. Giant robot creations called Sentinels flew down and took the two away, flying then into the air to some far off lair.
I had no idea what had happened. I had no idea who or what the Vision was (an android created by Ultron to destroy the Avengers but who ultimately joined the team instead). He had a relationship to the villainous Grim Reaper and a long dead hero called Wonder Man that again took me years to figure out. Who had created the Sentinels? Why were they collecting all of the mutant super heroes and where were they taking them? What was a mutant?
My head was spinning. Best twenty cents I ever spent. Comics of the time, or more importantly, the sense of wonder and excitement that they gave me, have stayed with me and influenced me my entire life. Like girls watching super models, the heroes became my role models. And the language play that I learned, the terms and concepts that I never would have been exposed to otherwise, have all stayed with me to this day.
Perhaps the saddest part of my childhood came when my parents thought I was reading too many (reading too much!) and put a moratorium on my not so secret life. For a time I was miserable until I convinced them that by abandoning all my favorite titles in the middle of ongoing story arcs I had wasted a bunch of money. They agreed to reinstate me on a limited basis, followed by another ban (I remember that moment: in an effort to interest my brother, I made a comment based on a Marvel Team-Up with Spider-Man and the Human Torch, about how they were fighting Morbius, a vampire; I made it sound like the title was not part of an ongoing arc (and it wasn't) and the hammer fell again). But then slowly I crept back into the collecting fold and they wisely decided not to challenge it.
Sounds a bit like an addiction to me. Unlike video games, though, I think reading anything is more productive and beneficial than playing those games. You learn vocabulary and language usage; you're exposed to human behaviors, some noble and others deserving of super hero intervention; you can appreciate the art, the figures, the personalities: in short, your imagination can be stimulated to heights otherwise unachievable to non-literate adolescents. I never spent time reading comic books and then looked back and said, damn, I just threw away hours of my life. And I've done that with video games and watching late night movies on HBO.
My kids will read. If it's comic books that interest them, they can have them without restriction. We have a set of Harry Potter books on order, and I've got the first nine Three Investigators books by Robert Arthur just waiting for my boy to start reading. I saw an Encyclopedia Brown book in the store two days ago and I remember how my father could ALWAYS figure out the mysteries and how every third or fourth one that I could solve made me feel absolutely exhilarated. I think comics can do for them what they did for me, bring me into a world of books and learning and knowledge.
And wonder. Open eyed excitement. How else would they get those incredible feelings? It's not going to happen by sitting in front of a television or a computer monitor. They need to engage their imaginations and if there's a better way to do it, I don't know what it is.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 11:15 AM
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