Funnybooks

When I was young I lived near a golf course. We'd collect all the stray golf balls that would end up in the yard or the ditch in the evenings. Then, I'd go sit on a bench next to a tee-off and sell them to the golfers who would come by. This was easy money, but it could be kind of dull, so I'd often bring something to read. I'd often read Mad or Cracked magazine, which of course are full of silly comics. One day, an older guy bought some golf balls from me and said, as he gave me my money, "Now you can buy more funnybooks."

I'd never heard anyone refer to comic book as a "funnybook" before, and I've never heard anyone use the term since, at least, not without a high degree of irony. Nevertheless, ever since about that time, I've been a big fan of funnybooks of all kinds. From Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge to Warren Ellis' Planetary, and everything in between. I like superhero comics, autobiographical comics (in particular, Seth's Palookaville), and most every other kind as well. Part of our house actually kind of looks like a comic book store now, since Sue and I bought a big wooden magazine rack from a drugstore going out of business -- of course, I filled it with comics.

I recently saw a History Channel special on the history of comic books -- specifically superhero comics. It was very well done. Not surprisingly, it spent a great deal of attention on the two classics of the genre from the 1980s: Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. After watching the program, I was inspired to reread both series.

I wanted to know, after 17 years, were they still worth the hype, or had nostalgia colored my opinion? See, I try very hard to manage my nostalgia. I look back and think, "Man, Battlestar Galactica was a great show," and then watch an old episode only to discover that my opinion was shaped by the viewpoint of a science-fiction starved 10-year-old. I remember the good times playing some of the early D&D modules that I had so much fun with, but a lot of them -- seen with the honest eyes of a 35-year-old with 25 years of gaming experience -- aren't the masterpieces my nostalgia-filled brain considered them. When I think about it, I'm not looking at the actual TV show, but at the joy I had as a kid watching. It's not so much the module I remember so fondly -- it's being 10 or 11 years old. (This isn't a criticism of either Battlestar Galactica or old D&D modules -- I'm just observing that sometimes the things we love have more to do with us than the things.)

So, I kind of expected to find that the landmark comic series I read in high school and college would seem a little less innovative or interesting as I look at them now, older and maybe even more mature and wiser (although that's up for debate).

But they didn't. In fact, unlike so many "you can't go home again" kind of experiences, these comics are even better than I had remembered. In particular, Watchmen, a 12-issue series presenting superheroes in a fairly realistic light, is stunning. Not only are the characters imaginative and the plot compelling -- hallmarks of good comics and probably the two things that comics do best -- but the craft of the writing and how it synchs up with the art is so complex and so deep that you'll miss some of it if you don't read it very slowly or multiple times. Moore takes multiple stories, or sometimes different parts of the same stories, seemingly unrelated, and weaves them together in a way that is both simple and intricate. In short, he fools you into thinking that two very related things are in fact unrelated, or that two unrelated things are related. Somehow, as you're reading the comic, with every other panel alternating between action in the present and in the past, or alternating between two different stories (for example, the main plot and the plot of a comic book one of the characters is reading), with dialogue spilling from one to the other, you'll swear that in fact it's only one line of narrative. Moore accomplishes this by linking the themes so closely together, and masterfully making the words of one panel, from one story, actually seem relevant to the other story, shown in the next panel. And he keeps this up page after page. I remember that, when I first started reading the Watchmen back in the 80s and saw what he was doing, I hated this approach. When I actually read it, I found it entertaining. Now I see it as an absolute marvel.

It's interesting to me that Watchmen and Dark Knight came out so close together, have so little in common, and yet in the vast scheme of things seem to be saying the same thing. Both were heralded as the death of the superhero comic, and were certainly (but from hearing what both authors have to say, inadvertently) instrumental in ushering in a darker mood in comics. To be sure, neither is a light-hearted romp. The Dark Knight Returns takes us into a strange future where Reagan is still president and Batman is long retired. (It's interesting that both comics have strong political undercurrents, which comics never had before them.) It's a dystopian future with a strong totalitarian government, although few see it that way due to Orwellian media spin-doctoring (that's a lot of -ian words in one sentence). Miller paints this future for us by continually showing us what news broadcasters are saying, regarding the events of the story. He uses this technique so much that soon we're practically watching future TV rather than reading a Batman comic. In this 4-issue series, Miller presents us with such a believable, aging Batman, with complex motivations and opinions that we soon find ourselves believing in this character despite all the years of silly Silver Age stories and campy TV show episodes that rightfully should have done in the character years ago.

It's just good writing, pure and simple. Moore and Miller both understand how to present a story on a comic book page, and how that's different from a novel or a movie. Although there was talk of movie adaptations of both, I think that neither would work well on the screen (or in a novel), particularly Watchmen. You could never tell a cohesive story on the screen, flipping back and forth between two different things, the way both writers use the comic book panels.

So even today, although there are plenty of good funnybooks that I enjoy -- Powers, Alias, New X-Men, Y The Last Man, and others -- I look on these two hallmark series as still the best in the medium. Along with Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which I think of in a different light because it's a more massive work, and portions of Dave Sim's Cerebus, these are comics I expect to be re-reading even when I'm very old.

If these books sound interesting to you, check them out at Amazon: Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.