The Twisted Roots of Comics

I first went to the San Diego Comics Convention in 1984. I went as a fan, but also to do some interviews and research on a book Will Jacobs and I were writing, a history of modern superhero comics called The Comic Book Heroes. I'd been to comics conventions before, but nothing like this: more than 5,000 people filling two rooms of a decent-sized convention center, and almost all of them talking about comic books. There were already a few people lamenting the early days, when the con had been small and intimate, but for me it was a thrill.
       The next year I went back as the author of a book of comics history about to be published, with copies of the cover in hand. The year after that I went as a somewhat well-known member of the industry's "fan press." In 1987 I went as what we called a "pro" or "creator," specifically as the cowriter of a low-profile comic book called The Trouble with Girls, which made me feel like a member of an exclusive club. The next year I went and discovered I had fans. In 1989 I went as the writer of a DC superhero series, with more projects in the works to brag about, and it was at the con, in the lobby between the two big rooms, that I learned that The Trouble with Girls had been picked up by 20th Century-Fox. I could plausibly pose as a big shot.
       The convention had its own experience with big-shotism in those years. Comics got hip. Dark Knight, Watchmen, Maus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and finally the Tim Burton Batman. Attendance soared suddenly to 11,000. Two years later, the con moved to the colossal new convention center by the harbor, with its interlocking halls and absurdly high ceilings, and the bigger publishers started setting up towering, flashing, booming displays as if they were at a real trade show. The video game business jumped on board, then Hollywood. By its second year at the new location, attendance had broken 20,000, two years later 30,000. The comic book business itself suffered a bubble-popping and cataclysmic decline in the mid-'90s, but by then comics were a small enough part of Comic Con that it was easy not to notice. 
       My own career didn't follow the same upward trajectory. I found myself much in demand, took on too much, burned out, started doing mediocre work, and became pretty negative about the whole industry. In the lean years it took a lot of work just to find work, and I didn't have the stomach for it anymore. By the end of the '90s I was happy to move my career back to nonfiction, where it had started. 
       Still, I kept going to the con. It was getting pretty unpleasant in a many ways by the time attendance broke 50,000 around the turn of the century (and my the con became more and more just a pretext to hang out with my friend Joe Filice, who lived in San Diego), but I never stopped wanting to go. By then, what kept me most connected to the thing was just what had brought me there in the first place: my love for the medium and its history. I went there to research another book about comics history, Men of Tomorrow, then again to promote it, then again to accept an Eisner Award for it, and several times since to join various esoteric panel discussions of how comics came to be.
             In the past few years, most of my appearances have been about a new book I'm working on with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, the biography of her grandfather, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, who pretty much founded the American comics industry as we know it. And so it was this year. About 130,000 people attend that thing every year now. I'd guess that the great majority of them have little or no interest in comic books themselves. Even of the many thousands who do love comics, I'd say that only a few hundred are willing to go out of their way to attend a panel on the early history of the field. But those are the few hundred I want to be among.
         This year, our "Twisted Roots of Comics" panel was subtitled "Pulp Magazines and the Birth of the Modern Comics." I moderated, with my cowriter, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, to one side and three experts in their fields on the other: Nathan Vernon Madison, a historian of the pulps and author of Anti-Foreign Imagery in Pulps and Comic Books 1920-1960, Brad Ricca, author of the superbly researched and written Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Creators of Superman, and Michael Uslan, writer, producer, teacher, and a boy who still loves Batman. Here's the audio. If you get a chance to listen, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed doing it (even if it doesn't look like it in the pictures).

Creative Hate

“If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!”
       The speaker is Thea Kronborg, the protagonist of Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark, a prairie-town girl who’s carving out a career as an opera singer. She’s partly based on a real singer Cather knew and admired, but a lot of what she says comes straight out of Cather’s own experience as a prairie-town girl then carving out her own impressive career as a novelist.

       “How can I get much satisfaction out of the enthusiasm of a house,” Thea asks, “that likes her atrociously bad performance at the same time that it pretends to like mine?” She’s talking about a rival singer, one who doesn’t live up to Thea’s idea of what vocal art ought to be. “If they like her, then they ought to hiss me off the stage. We stand for things that are irreconcilable, absolutely.”

      A couple of things have kept this on my mind lately: visiting Cather’s home town in Nebraska a few weeks ago and going to the San Diego Comic Con just last weekend.
       The Cather pilgrimage happened on my 57th birthday. It was fortuitous more than planned—my son had been intending to fly to Chicago for his annual G (as in Godzilla) Fest until he suddenly suggested we make it into a father-son road trip—but it turned out to be a powerful thing. Once I realized we’d be driving within fifty miles of Red Cloud, Nebraska, I decided to Cather it up good: listening to an audiobook of My Antonia (sending Nicky back to his earbuds), reading Five Stories when I wasn’t driving, making reservations at the Cather family home, now a guest house run the Willa Cather Foundation, doing the Cather tour run by selfsame Foundation, even having breakfast at the cafe with the hand-lettered sign in the window reading WE SELL CATHER. It was only two days that I spent immersed in her flat, hard country, her bright-burning ambition, and her spare, perfect art—but those two days have stayed with me.
       Comic Con was a different sort of pilgrimage. It was my 31st year in a row going to that thing. I was going there when I was “just a fan,” and I was going there when I was writing seven scripts a month for DC and Marvel; I was going there when I gave up writing the comics themselves to write about their history, and I kept going there when comics were just about the furthest things from my mind. (Lest this sound like some sort of morbid compulsion, I should tell you that the main point of the trip now is to hang out with my friend Joe Filice and his family, with the Con as a pretext and an organizing principle.) Every trip there, whether I like it or not, becomes a journey through my own creative and professional past. 
       And God, did I ever use that “creative hate” in my past! There were writers I loved, admired, emulated, tried to learn from. But there were other writers I couldn’t stand, writers I loved to bitch about and rage at, to satirize and mock (never to their faces, of course). And they were on my mind every bit as much as the writers I loved. Maybe more.
       These weren’t inept or egregiously bad writers. They were mostly popular or well respected, usually with good reason, but with aesthetics or goals or intended audiences drastically different from mine. They weren’t doing me any harm. Sometimes I tried to convince myself that they were taking away my audience, or degrading the form to the point that no one would be able to recognize good work, but that was only to justify my hostility. Nor was this about simple jealousy, although that would be easy to assume. It wasn’t really even about competitiveness. I could be very happy for another writer’s success, even when it was much greater than mine...if it was a writer I liked. 
       I needed those writers to define myself. I wasn’t one of those people who seems to have been born with a vision of what he must write. I wasn’t even very good at knowing who I was as a person, let alone as a writer. I spent a long time working at self-definition. For that I needed mentors, collaborators, and role models, but I also needed people to contrast myself against, people about whom I could say, “I’m definitely not that—so that must mean I’m this.” If I was clear on what I didn’t want to write, if I made that an anathema that would repel me every time I found myself drifting toward it, then I could stay on my own slowly emerging path.
       I found a lot of people to play that role: novelists, screenwriters, comics writers, and essayists, young writers emerging alongside me, aging veterans, and some who weren’t around anymore. I even had Thomas Wolfe on the list for a while (So damned self-preoccupied! Too many words! No discipline!), even though though the poor mug had been dead and losing critical favor for decades before I was born.
       And the more rage I could stir up against them, the more focus and energy I could bring to my own work. I nursed what Thea Kronborg calls the “contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.”

      Not that I was doing any of this consciously. Like an adolescent who suddenly finds his parents stupid and infuriating, I made up a world view that served my larger purposes—and then threw myself into it with a blind passion. (The whole process of finding myself as a writer was basically an adolescent journey, in fact. I just dragged it on for a decade or so beyond the age of acne.) Of course, if it hadn’t been unconscious, it wouldn’t have worked. Self awareness is not always our friend.
       Somewhere along the way, that all changed. As I became more comfortable in who I was and what I was doing as a writer, I lost my energy for mocking and complaining about others. Then, at some point (around the time I became a dad, I think) I began to develop a compassion and a feeling of solidarity with everyone else who was pursuing this nerve-wracking career, whether the results were anything I liked or not. And, having lost the need to define myself as Not That Guy, because I finally had a sense of myself as This Guy, I began to appreciate writers I had been unable to like before, even to appreciate them precisely because they broke my personal rules. Thomas Wolfe could churn out some pretty powerful descriptions with all those words.

       I figure we’re all out there doing our best, trying to do what we think is good or hope other people will like, and there’s room in the world for all our different aesthetics and philosophies and abilities. These days I can’t even work up the energy to mock the woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey. (In fact, I can never remember her name, which itself is different from the old days. Back then I would have had her name seared into my frontal lobe.) I assume she’s doing what she loves to do, and lots of people like it because it speaks to something in them, and that’s really fine with me. I do what I believe in doing, and people can stop to look at it if they want to. 
      Not that I don’t still have strong opinions. Not that I don’t get annoyed when a writer I like lets me down, especially if I think it’s from laziness or self-indulgence (you should’ve heard me when I finished The Goldfinch). I’ve just found that anger and judgment take more out of me now than they give back. Our emotional energy is finite, and I need to direct mine where it will do some good. 
       But I do try to catch myself when I’m tempted to tell some younger writer to lighten up or to lecture him on having compassion for our ink-stained comrades. I’m where I am because I went through the process, and the process, at least for me, required a fair amount of what Willa Cather had the guts to call “creative hate.”
       There’s something attractive about those feelings, too. There’s a vitality and a potency in that kind of negative intensity that my grown-up acceptance and compassion can never completely replace. I suspect Cather felt the same. Her judgments of younger writers became more measured and philosophical even as the youngsters started making fun of her, but she still let Thea Kronborg have her rage. Even when I feel stupid for some of the arrogant judgments I laid on good writers when I was young and self-obsessed, I can still hear the nobility in Thea’s call to arms: 
       “You can’t try to do things right and not despise the people who do them wrong. How can I be indifferent? If that doesn’t matter, then nothing matters.”

Silent Choice

Life is full of hard choices. Should I take a chance on being a writer or stay in college and find a normal career? Should I go on living for my work or learn what it's like to be a parent? Should I send my son to a private school or have a tiny bit of money left to retire on?

      But life has never thrown a tougher choice at me than the one I face this month. For 28 straight years I've attended the San Diego Comic Convention. For 14 straight years (minus one) I've attended the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Together they've filled my birthday month with a double celebration of visual narrative, cultural history, and esoteric connoisseurship. 
      This year, though, some cruel, cruel person in San Diego decided to move Comic Con a week earlier and place it directly up against the SFSFF. My 55th birthday present turns out to be an agonizing decision.

      I've wrestled with this for nearly a year, but in the end I've chosen the silents. Ultimately I suppose it's like choosing the temple over the marketplace. Comics and comics-inspired media are so much a part of the daily texture of our culture that even the biggest comics convention on earth can never manage to feel like much more than an extension of our ambient noise. But that most elegant of film festivals creates an alternate universe that for four days moves according to the rhythms, chiaroscuro, and orchestral textures of the shortest-lived of all the great art forms. 

      Of course there's the argument that comics are still alive and silent films aren't...but I never experience silent films as dead. There are still so many movies discovered that were thought lost forever, so many dug from under decades of obscurity, so many restored so thoroughly that they become entirely new works. And then there's all the new music being performed with them, and the hot arguments between those who want cutting-edge sounds from the Matti Bye Ensemble or the Alloy Orchestra to bring the old images closer to the present and the like-they-were-meant-to-be-accompanied purists. I thought a fistfight was about to break out during last year's music panel.

      The film festival is prettier, too: colossal black-and-white faces enshrined in the Spanish/Javanese/Beaux-Arts hodgepodge of the Castro Theatre instead of crayon-colored Avengers grimacing at the bleak concrete of the San Diego Convention Center. It sounds better: I'll take avant-garde mini-orchestras and sumptuous old-school organists over hyperamped videogame soundtracks just about any time. It's for a good cause, too, supporting the rescue and restoration of those vanishing films.
      When even all that failed to bring me to a decision, though, I fell back on professional rationalization: I've written many comics in the past and will surely write more in the future, but right now I'm finishing up a book about the cultural upheavals and moral revolutions of the early 20th Century, the birth of new patterns of communication and even a new kind of individual out of the first wave of mass media. And that, more than anything, is what the silent movies themselves were about. This year, those four days under the spell of century-old light will be my celebration not only of being a year older but of drawing The Undressing of America, at last, toward its close.

      I confess that I'm going to cheat on this a little: since Comic Con starts a day earlier, I'll pop in for that one day to keep my 29-year streak intact on paper. But then I'll fly north. The silents will still know that they've won my heart.
      The festival, once again, is presenting some rare and magnificent works, including a new restoration of the breathtaking Wings, another Ruan Lingyu heartbreaker from the golden age of Shanghai romanticism, and an Ernst Lubitsch movie (love that guy) long thought to be lost. The schedule is here.