Portrait of the Comics Reader as a Young-ish Man

1985. My apartment in New York City. A sudden realization, and not a pleasant one. My thirtieth birthday is right around the corner. I’m posted to turn one year older than Batman… I’ve come to accept, in recent years, that Spider-Man is younger than my brother, but Batman? Batman? My favorite childhood hero? The lantern-jawed wise father figure? I’m actually gonna be older than Batman? This was intolerable. Something had to be done.

With these words Frank Miller opens the collected edition of his most memorable contribution to comics, The Dark Knight Returns. The work presents perhaps, the most elegant solution to Miller’s problem. Miller makes Batman older, which in the parlance of graphic novels (née comics) means somewhere around fifty. Thus, we get a Batman, much older than Miller’s thirty, a Batman who worries about his knees when climbing up his bat-rope, who needs Bat-ifocals glasses to ensure that his batarangs hit their targets, and will probably need to go to Bat-cross for his medical needs. However, nothing in comics but the status quo lasts. DKR was only a few issues long and it was not long before Bruce Wayne stopped being a Dirty Old Man and became a dashing millionaire playboy again. The number one rule of comics: you get older, but Bruce Wayne will never collect Social Security.

It was only after college when I had some sense of what Frank Miller was writing about. I found that I could no longer identify with the teen sidekicks. My life had passed them by and unless their emotional plight hit some type of universal cord, I just could not identify with them. Yes, it could be exciting to see Robin fight a Yeti in the rocky mountains of Tibet, but in the end I could not care about his fights with his father or the bad grades he got because he was out fighting crime. Even for comics, it seemed trivial. I had my B.A., was working a crappy administrative job at UCLA, and was hopping that I would get into graduate school so that said job would be over. Robin was fifteen, worrying about getting his driver license, and was hopping the Teen Titans would ask him to join. I was simply too old to be hanging out with the Boy Wonder. I had Big Boy concerns.

But, if comics eventually make you feel old because you outgrow the characters, things get even worse when you realize that your mastery over the storylines has grown out of date. Every 10 years DC Comics does what fans call retconning, meaning that they retroactively change their company wide continuity; they change the narrative past. Small retconning is common place in comics to allow for creative growth, however every ten years it seems DC attempts to do it in a comprehensive way. Since DC Comics overhauled their line last year I’ve found that things I could recall with a frightening level of encyclopedic detail – things such as Superman’s origin story – have been, if not fundamentally altered, significantly tweaked. Now, if you asked me to give you a description of what Krypton was like, I honestly could not tell you with any veracity. This is after a lifetime of reading Superman comics. Things I used to know, I don’t know anymore. What really makes you feel old as a comics is fan is not growing older than the perpetually young heroes of your childhood, but that comics companies force an odd form of senility upon you. It’s nerdy, fictitious Alzheimer’s and I don’t know my way around the House of Mystery.

The cure: read more comics. But with my healthcare, how could I afford it? Anyway, can’t I die with dignity and just read the reprints?

Comics vs. Baseball

The past two days have provided me with more reasons why Baseball should be favored over comics, at least seasonally. I saw this morning at Comic Book Resources pictures from Wizard World Chicago, one of the summer’s big Comics Conventions. The fact that I share an interest with these people is frightening.

While CBR has plenty of pictures of kids dressed up as their favorite characters, for every picture of a young Captain America beaming because he got to go to a convention in costume, there are more than three dozen like the one above. Here Butterball Superman, 15 year old Batman, and what appears to be Keanu Reeves in a bad wig as Green Lantern, pose for their picture. And while it’s obvious that these three like the attention their receiving from the comics fan press and no doubt their fellow fans at the con, there seems to be to be something unreasonable about a fan that goes to such heights. Where Superman’s smirk betrays a confidence, I’m just a little embarrassed for him by how the costume accentuates his man boobs. Is this just an expression of self-neglect and social stigma turned into a strange expression of prideful abnegation? Really, I think there are better ways to go. Even secret shame seems a more dignified response. Or even making fun of those who clearly have no secret shame.

The more positive aspect to this comparison is that I was recently inspired to work out harder by the Dodgers, thus avoiding a Super-Belly and Super-Heart Disease and Super-Diabetes. I was at the gym the other day and the game happened to be on. It was the top of the sixth, and the Dodgers were loosing to the Marlins, one to three. I planned on a fifty minute run and intended to leave when my time was up. But as I was running the Dodgers began to turn the tide, mostly due to the ineptitude of the Marlins’ pitching staff, which walked in three runs. By the end of the seventh inning The Dodgers were up four runs and I was nearly done with my run. Not only did I want to see the end of the game – another post-trade Dodgers victory – but it dawned on me that in running, I was in fact being more athletic than any of the ball players out on the field that day. While certainly they could all outrun me, out hit me, and out field me, a lot of the time they were just standing around waiting for a hit. By running at a constant rate, I was in fact getting more of a work out than they were. When the work out program ended towards the beginning of the eighth I decided to run for the rest of the game, and I ended up running about eight miles for about eighty minutes.

The recruiters should be knocking on my door any day now.