I love stories from comic books that are about comic books; artists, editors, anything that makes me feel I am getting a look inside the busy atmosphere of a comic book publishing company. In “Raving Maniac” from Suspense #29 (1953), drawn by Joe Maneely, an irate critic of comics invades the office to complain about showing monsters, and the editor refutes his criticism. Frankly, if this is a poke at those who were publicly criticizing comic books at the time, then it would bounce off any comic book hater. As I have found out, it is nearly impossible to get past a prejudice with examples, facts, or even humor. Whoever wrote the story was preaching to the choir about comics; no one who hated them would be dissuaded from their hatred. They might also be upset about how the title is a pun on the resolution of the story, “Raving Maniac.”
From Menace #7 (1953):
One of aspects of the story of Hansel and Gretel than is noted by only a few people is that the children get involved with the witch with an attempt literally to eat her out of house and home, essentially vindicating the claim of the step-mother.
ReplyDeleteMy mother was no fan of comic books, but it occurred to her that they might be used to teach remedial reading. For her master's thesis, she undertook an attempt to put them to such purpose, only to discover that they presupposed too much reading ability to be suited to that purpose. She didn't tell me about that until many years after she'd completed the project; so I think that she was loath to acknowledge the truth outside of the thesis itself. But still she had been made to change her mind to some extent.
However, more typically, it is just as you say, and not simply about what are ordinarily recognized as prejudices. People form commitments, and adopt irrational immunizing strategies to protect those commitments. Even when the commitment that they've formed is to the very position that reason indicates to be most plausible, people will employ those unreasonable immunizing strategies.
And, of course, creating narratives in which one's opponents are represented by raving maniacs or by servants of Satan or by racists — as if we may impeach a set of positions based upon the character of its subscribers rather than the other way around — is very much a part of the pattern of insulating one's beliefs against serious challenge.
Daniel, when my wife was a librarian for a school district she occasionally got packets of comic books designed for remedial readers. King Features used their copyrighted characters like Blondie and Popeye for that purpose. I don't know if any teachers tried to use them. I learned to read from comic books for the simple reason that they were more interesting than Dick and Jane, but that was the early fifties when comic books were under fire. I remember not admitting to my teacher I read Uncle Scrooge and Superman, or that I liked them a lot better than the boring stuff they gave me. (I had my own Comics Code Authority in the form of my mother, who paid for the comic books, so they had to pass her censorship "test.") Mom regretted taking me too he puppet movie of Hansel and Gretel because of the undertone of the story, which she knew from childhood, but then suddenly saw through my eyes and realized the idea of abandoned children and witches designing traps to catch them and eat them was upsetting to me. In retrospect I see the children as victims, both of their parents, whose job was to protect them, and the witch, who wanted to murder them and eat them. Hansel and Gretel's crime was brought on by hunger, as was the witch's, but she was a predatory adult, and stealing candy isn't the same crime as cannibalism.
ReplyDeleteI always assumed that the witch created the house specifically as a lure, but I might be mistaken.
ReplyDeleteThe first story is more cathartic for Stan, but the second one is a great piece of comedy, with pretty good timing and some funny lifts from Sinnott, especially referencing the Old Witch (by name, even!) That's the kind of stuff that must have driven Gaines through the roof!
Maneely, as always, does a wonderful job on his tale, but it's a bit too preachy. The second one mixes in a lot of humor and it works much better. Still, as a whole, Atlas' output was almost always head and shoulders above most of the competition.
I don't want to endorse the story of Hansel and Gretel; I want people to see the subtext. The story emerges from a time and place in which parental obligation was seen as less binding than it later came to be seen. Even though the children were brought into being by a choice on the part of their father, the step-mother could successfully argue that neither he nor his partner (she) were obligated to get them even to a state of self-sufficiency. The father is often presented as if he is a good but weak man, which is to say that his abandonment of these two children is somehow forgivable. The children, as I noted, do literally begin to eat the witch out of house and home. The story is more horrible than just one of children confronted by an evil witch; it is a story set within a world in which parents have little responsibility to be parents and in which children have no right to be children.
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