Squa Tront!
Spa Fon!
I know what you’re thinking! I am not a Martian. (Alien? Perhaps. Outré? mais oui!)
surely a fan of EC Comics?
but marginally.
Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror used to scare the stuffing out of me. Too dark! Disgustingly graphic! Sinful fun, nonetheless.
The picture of Bill Gaines on the inside jacket of the book that I have in front of me as I sit here and write, “Horror Comics of the 1950’s” is more than a little frightening in itself.
I was a fan, however of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and the amalgam Weird Science-Fantasy. What could be better than Science Fiction created by “the usual gang of idiots”? I manage once or twice a year to purchase a copy of Mad Magazine. Laugh? You bet!
I feel that, in these ending years of my life, it is not only natural but necessary to explore the notions and conceptions that are somehow at the base of my being. ‘It’s what older folks do.’ Hollow echoes. Empty corridors. Furthermore my psyche seems in tune with this search and the deeper I probe, the further it resounds, the more comes to light. I bypass all the pain and hurt that is the constant bother of scores of memory. The same that keep me tossing fitfully as I sleep at night. The ones that are like a cold, hard steel poker thrust into a raw wound. I’ll deal with those as I can, but it is more important, at the moment, to dive deep, maybe even into those proclaimed archetypal depths, the ones that may link us all.
Ah Popular Culture!
It doesn’t matter what beach you inhabit when you see “…the world in a grain of sand…” or in what field you stand when you “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” By God, Mr.Bloom, Harold or Leopold, Western Canon or Buck’s snot-green, a color for poets, I am truly astounded by the breathtaking span of intellect and intuition that Shakespeare can provide, but have found much of the same sense and wonder plucking at me in what, for lack of a more imposing name, is called Popular Culture. The Popular Culture that clots twists and tangles my own peculiar mind.
I started the quest with the idea that I would find repose in the science fiction that I devoured in my preteen years. I have on my shelves, close at hand, among a myriad of others, almost the entire run of the Winston Science Fiction Juveniles that I first read in Junior High School. I have copies of science fiction magazines from the 1950’s through the ..well.. really through the present. The thirteen Heinlein Juveniles. Anthologies prepared by Groff Conklin. Articles by L. Sprague De Camp, criticism by Damon Knight, history by James Blish. I admit it, both as a guilty pleasure and with an occasional glimpse of deep insight, that I enjoy them all. Can think of a little better in the evening than to sit and re-read and re-experience the wonder the awe the horror that those titles provoked in my dreaming foaming psyche. Are they much of a mature literary pleasure? No! It is far more solitary and complex. I would not recommend it to everyone. But I assure you there is something there for my world to see. I can feel it. Synesthesia.
My early journeys to worlds dreamed then published are not the only entrance to the underground mine. By turns I have looked to B List movies and listened to the radio programs that covered the AM dial in the second to the fifth decades of the twentieth century. To what used to be called comic books that have sadly grown into slick expensive graphic novels. AHA! It seems that I am showing my old codgerness, my conservative cultural stripes, but the point here is that in my rash youth popular culture was evanescent. It captured the zeitgeist and then was bundled with the trash. It only seems now that the manifest sweeping panorama of spirit and mind had any lasting value. (Yes, of course, my mother threw away a fortune in DC and EC comics. That’s why God made mothers.) Those heady and primitive stabs of media were formative, part of a transition, part of my foundation. Right and Wrong. Blazing brilliant and blasphemous.
With a strong puff of dust I blow where Professor Maracot has his deep, Challenger his Jurassic plateau and Hans his Pfall; where Johnny Mack Brown hardly ever gets dirty; where Tom Bartlett and his twin brother Pat communicate across the stars; where Sam throws over Brigid or is it Miss Wonderly for popping Miles, who he didn’t even like that much; where on a sloping beach far past even Weena’s demise and the flesh eating horrors of the proletarian Morlock, crab like creatures grasp and then further still until it is further still.
I do not yet wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.