ON ADULT READERS OF GOLDEN AGE COMICS

 Another response-post, this time to a thread dealing with the extent to which newsstand comics of the Golden Age (such as the Prize title of the late forties, BABE DARLING OF THE HILLS) aimed their content at older readers.

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I don't dispute any of this, but would add that young adult readers read comics on the sly, because there was still a sense that comics were meant for kids, and for an adult to read them suggested naivete at best, like Gomer Pyle with his eternal "Shazam." 

And comics were dominantly bought by kids. In the late forties a lot of titles, including the aforementioned BABE, cut back their page count in order to keep the cover price at ten cents. Even in the sixties and seventies slight changes to that expected price had consequences for whatever company tried to boost the price.

This discussion does throw some light on a comment Frederic Wertham made in SEDUCTION. He wanted comics prohibited from kids under a certain age, and I've always thought that was a cynical way of wanting to expunge the entire medium from existence. I still think that *would* have happened, had his totalitarian desires been enacted. But he may have TOLD himself that there was an audience of older teens who might support the medium-- which he viewed as irredeemable due to the corruption of the companies-- and that comic books would be given the chance to flourish or perish like any other media aimed at adults. 

It's possible that the publishers of BABE, just to keep to that example, were hoping to draw in the kid-audience with silly hijinks without their actually being aware of the fetish-connotations, while getting a little sales boost from older readers "in the know." A fair number of horror comics exploited such content as well, naturally,

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE END OF MISTY MAGIC LAND"], TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2 (2006)

NOTE: There is no particular title to the "Little Margie" story appearing in TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2; I have imposed one for clarity's sake. 

The complicated background of this story merits enumeration. (1) Alan Moore collaborated with J.H. Williams III on the series PROMETHEA for Moore's imprint America's Best Comics. The title character is a multi-faceted entity from "The Immateria," a land of pure imagination, and thus Promethea has existed in various independent fictional incarnations. (2) In one such incarnation, the heroine is a tutelary figure in a comic strip, "Little Margie in Misty Magic Land," where Promethea guides the little girl Margie through a host of fantasy-realms, the two women accompanied only by a comedy-relief "China boy." (3) "Margie" was Moore's pastiche on Windsor McCay's 1905 comic strip, "Little Nemo in Slumberland," whose installments were full Sunday page comics with no individual titles-- which is why there were no titles when Alan Moore and Eric Shanower created a full "Nemo" pastiche for AMERICA'S BEST COMICS SPECIAL #1 (2001), and no titles for this second and last pastiche from TOMORROW STORIES, executed by Shanower and Moore's colleague Steve ("no relation") Moore. 

Alan Moore's pastiche was pleasant but not particularly well organized. Since Steve Moore probably scripted his tale knowing that the days for America's Best were numbered, he provided a final "Little Margie" story that effectively concludes not only the character's series but also her childhood.

It's a common enough trope that as humans grow older they began to lose the imaginative freedom of their juvenile years, and Steve Moore (henceforth the only "Moore" I'll reference) practically broadcasts this theme on the first page of "End." (He also shows himself the equal of Promethea's creator in coming up with torturous puns, like the above "Prophetta Doom.")

Once Margie, her guide Promethea and comic-relief Chinky have received suggestions of a danger to Misty Magic Land, they seek to learn the danger's source. It does not take long for them to receive the first intimation from a clockwise individual named Thomas Tick-Tock, who discerns that Margie herself may be the problem, since she is a mortal who does not belong to the magical world, yet has not aged in nineteen years. "Perhaps I have not aged because I did not want to," muses Margie, "but should I have wanted to?" Promethea tries to lighten Margie's mood by taking her to the Chuckling Orchard, but Margie remains morose. 

The girls have better luck in the Menagerie of Moods-- but only briefly, for after some brief cheer, Margie falls into first depression, and then conceives race hatred for Chinky (encouraged by a mood-creature in a red Ku Klux Klan robe). 

Then Promethea moves to a deeper theme, though not one with much resonance for childhood: showing Margie how lack of emotional control results in the Horror of War. Margie flees the spectres of war, and it's at this point that Chinky diverges from Margie's of him, renouncing his role as "funny foreigner" and returning to his own realm, a fantasy-China realm.

The exit of the male presence in Margie's world leads her to a fairground, where she enjoys her first kiss with what looks to be Little Nemo himself. She quarrels with Promethea, acting as if the goddess is a controlling mother, and with that, Margie begins to age as she would in the real world, growing out of Misty Magic Land. So the danger to the dream-realm has always been Margie's attunement to it, and this is the last of the author's "Margie" stories, because, as she tells her own little girl, she's lost her connection to her juvenile self, and no longer has any stories to tell.

NEAR MYTHS: RAPUNZEL’S REVENGE (2008)

 

Though I wouldn’t deem illustrated prose books like the Doctor Seuss canon as relevant to the comics medium, RAPUNZEL’S REVENGE is a fully illustrated graphic novel, even though the book''s credits page is reminiscent of standard children’s books like those of Seuss, announcing that REVENGE is written by “Shannon Hale and Dean Hale” and “illustrated by Nathan Hale.” But this hardbound book is just as much an all-comics sequential narrative as anything from the oeuvre of Will Eisner.

One of the most clever aspects of REVENGE is that even though it’s playing with European folktales after the fashion of SHREK and many others, the world looks like the American West, where everyone dresses in cowboy gear and the bandits wield six-guns, not cudgels. The Hales may have been intending to riff on Baum’s famed “Oz” series, and if so this particular book—which has at least one sequel I've not read—is a credit to the first major fantasy-author of American literature.

As one might expect, the authors only emulate a few basic tropes of the Rapunzel folktale. The female protagonist is like her original  also stolen from her mother at a young age, and she ends up getting imprisoned by a witch in a tower-like contrivance until Rapunzel’s locks grow long enough to reach the ground. However, the folktale Rapunzel remains in her tower until she becomes a nubile maiden, and she uses her long locks to allow her lover access to her tower. But the Hales’ Rapunzel is twelve when she finds out many unpleasant truths about Gothel, the woman she was raised to believe as her true mother. Not only did Mother Gothel (using the same name as the witch in the folktale) steal Rapunzel from her real mother, the sorceress is also a hard-hearted tyrant, enslaving many nearby communities. Because the old woman is a mistress of plant-growth magic, she can control what plants do or don’t grow in the terrain, and so everyone bends the knee to her. Apparently, she can’t grow anything in her own womb—though the story doesn’t explicitly say so—since she adopts young Rapunzel for the purpose of having a successor. When Rapunzel rebels, she gets stuck in a mile-high hollowed-out tree to break her spirit—and when that doesn’t work, Gothel abandons Rapunzel.

As one might expect in these post-feminist times, this young girl does not wait for a prince to save her; she frees herself and goes on a quest to unseat Gothel and to find her true mother. What I didn’t expect is the Hales’ adeptness with humor and drama, which keep REVENGE from reading like a dull “girl power” diatribe. Rapunzel finds that her long hair, when braided, can be wielded against opponents either as whips or as lassos, which is certainly a livelier development than we got from Disney’s TANGLED. The heroine does make a male ally—Jack of “beanstalk” fame, who dresses rather like Paul Newman’s “Butch Cassidy.” There’s a little “pre-teen romance” toward the end, though no more than a young reader could tolerate. On the whole the book emphasizes fast-and-furious adventure, as Jack and “Punzie” (as Jack nicknames the long-locked girl) visit various locales, both seeking out Gothel’s keep and avoiding such menaces as bandits, dwarves, and a pack of hungry coyotes. The action-sequences, while not a patch on the greatest fight-scenes from the history of comics, are far better than one can find in most comic books of the 21^st century.

On a closing note, the only specific folktales referenced here are those of “Rapunzel” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” According to the theories I advanced in this essay, both of these are ‘innominate texts,” and so the crossover of these versions of the long-haired lass and the beanstalk boy would be a “high-charisma crossover.”