Learning Experience: Learning to Love

¶ … Learning Experience: Learning to Love Comic Books

When this writer was just 4 years old, a traumatic experience that resulted in a love and appreciation of comic books that remains firmly in place today. While playing barefooted in my room one warm summer day, I opened my closet door to find something to play with only to pull the door open in such a way that it caught the nail of my right big toe, tearing it off completely. As the pain set in and the blood started to gush, my screams brought my parents running to see what could have caused such turmoil from a child who had been playing quietly just minutes before the event. After they saw my injured toe and bloody toenail lying on the floor and listened to my grief-stricken explanation about what happened through my sobs, my father carried me to my bed and my mother bandaged my toe. A trip to the hospital emergency room confirmed that the nail would grow back normally and I would recover completely physically but I would required to stay off the foot for several days to allow the toe to heal properly and to avoid reinjuring it.

Because I was laid up in bed for several days, my mother treated me to all of my favorite foods and even though I was just 4 years old, my father decided I needed something to read to keep myself occupied while confined to bed. One of my fondest memories from childhood is my father appearing at the door to my room with a stack of 50 used comic books he had purchased from a used comic book store downtown (that is no longer there), tied up securely with brown cord that he handed to me with a smile and assured me that there was plenty of entertainment in there to keep me happy until my toe was healed.

Although dubious at first, I untied the cord and looked at what he had brought me. There were Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and Superman comics by the dozen, as well as numerous Little Lulu, Baby Huey, Dennis the Menace and L'il Dot. After quickly scanning the pictures and relishing the lavish artwork and coloring of Carl Barks in the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics, I was hooked. "Read me, read me," I insisted to my parents and was treated to their rather poor renditions of duck and superhero voices, but it was all just great stuff. Indeed, I forgot all about my toe and relished every one of the comic books over the next several days.

Over time, I made the mental leap from symbols on the comic book pages in the balloon captions to reading and found myself able to read the comic books entirely before ever beginning formal schooling. Moreover, I was transported to distant lands where I encountered famous figures from history in these comics, as well as learning about some important events in history such as the construction of Hadrian's wall (in an Uncle Scrooge comic), the development of the Mayan calendar and the fabulous mural artwork in Mexico City (in a Dennis the Menace Vacation Annual), and Donald Duck and his nephews' Huey, Dewey and Louis's search for the philosopher's stone. This was powerful stuff for a young person and these readings helped fuel my interest in pursuing other outside and more formal research into these areas. There was a certain attraction to real-life people that intrigued me as well. For example, superheroes such as Superman, the Metal Men, the X-Men and the Flash were fine, of course, but I was drawn to heroes who were "super" without any special "superpowers" because of their other personal attributes such as Batman and especially the Green Arrow. In fact, I recall securing my first archery set and practicing relentlessly in the hopes that I too could be as good as the Green Arrow someday, and although this would never happen, I did become a proficient archer in the process.

Throughout my childhood and well into early adolescence, I continued to spend an inordinate amount of my allowance on comic books and expanded my interests to other characters and art styles, such as Will Eisner's use of innovative vantage points such as top-down views to illustrate his famous "The Spirit" series, but I always found myself drawn back to Donald Duck, his nephews, Uncle Scrooge and the eccentric inventor, Gyro Gearloose, whose zany inventions always seem to go awry.

Although I eventually lost most of my interest in comic books upon reaching late adolescence because of other more pressing interests, of late I have found myself returning to my comic book collection and rereading some of my old favorites from the prolific late Carl Barks. Some casual research helped me understand why I liked these comic books in particular so much. It turns out that Barks wrote and drew all of the Uncle Scrooge and Gyro Gearloose as well as many of the Donald Duck comic books single-handedly, and was responsible for literally thousands of pages of comic books that I treasure among my collection today. Indeed, these early issues have been reprinted time and again by various publishing houses in the United States and Europe, and it is little wonder they continue to attract new fans today.