May 23: Comics are not just for kids

By Amy Richard

How is it, I ask myself, that I am reading simultaneously "Understanding Comics," which uses comics to discuss comics, and "Promethea," a collection of comics about a woman who becomes the mythic heroine she's been researching?

I, who have never read a comic book from cover to cover.

Comic strips are a different story. I've read those for years-"Peanuts," "Dennis the Menace," "Prince Valiant" (because my Dad liked it and Val was the name of our dog), "Garfield," "Bloom County," "Outland," "The Far Side," "Doonesbury," "Dilbert," and many more.

But never comic books.

Maybe it's because as a kid I never knew anyone who read them. And maybe I never bought them because older boys always hovered in front of the comics racks in the corner store where they were sold.

So why comics now?

It started with a novel - as many good things often do.

Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" was one of those books I couldn't put down. It's the story of two cousins who get into the comics business in the 1930s. The book is a kick -funny, poignant and smart - plus it tweaked my interest in comics.

About the same time "The New Yorker's" supplement, "Cover Stories," arrived in the mailbox. This one was about covers by New Yorker artists reflecting on some aspect of the arts. Among the covers discussed is a 1999 illustration by Art Spiegelman that shows some rapt patrons viewing a Picasso and a Goya in an art museum - except for the few who are aghast to see Jack Cole's comic book character Plastic Man rubbernecking the art.

Comics again, and this time in the world of high art.

Then, of course, "Spider Man" hit the movie theatres. I admit I had a heck of a good time at the show. Toby McGuire seemed to be having such fun flying between buildings, touching down for a kiss every now and again. How could I not love it?

It was "Spider Man" that finally got me into More Fun, one of Ashland's comics store. I wanted a book about comics.

Scott Hutchins, the owner of the store, received me kindly, even when I had given him no notice, and he hadn't had his cup of coffee.

As one might expect, his store is filled with comics, but I never knew there were so many different types of comics. There are the ones about the super heroes, but there are comics for opera buffs (Richard Wagner's "The Ring," for example), Japanese comics, comics from your favorite TV shows (I was tickled to find new episodes of "Buffy" in comics). Or, if one prefers more serious fare, there is Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust epic, "Maus," or Joe Sacco's journalistic comics "Palestine" or "Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Bosnia, 1992-1995," a 1996 American Book Award winner.

Hutchins also had just the book for me, Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics." As I mentioned, it's a book that uses comics to examine the medium.

Comics, I'm discovering, take us back to our roots when visual icons were the language. Yet there's much more to comics' storytelling than pictures and a plotline. In a previous draft of this column I had pretty much defined comics as a hybrid of the graphic arts and prose fiction, but McCloud says no, because doing so misses the key element in comics' storytelling - the transitions between panels, those empty spaces where, as he puts it, "none of our senses are required at all ... which is why all of our senses are engaged." What happens between these panels, McCloud says, "is a kind of magic only comics can create."

So will I become a comics reader? I'm enjoying my two current choices. Whether comics become a standard in the piles next to my bed ... only time will tell.

Amy Richard has lived in Ashland since 1990, was Revels editor at The Tidings for three years, and since June of 1998 has been media relations director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.