My girlfriend’s 9-year old daughter, who has expressed an interest in comic books, and actually one day writing them, recently asked her Mom, “Are there any comic books with girl main characters?” As we all know, most comic books today are not, to put it mildly, particularly kid friendly so I took finding her something appropriate with a “girl main character” as a challenge. Did some research, came up with Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures In the 8th Grade. Not a long-running series, only six issues, but done for kids, with all six issues collected into one trade paperback. Her Mom bought it for her, she loved it. Carried it around with her everywhere. At one point, after all that carrying around, the pages began to come loose from the cover, she rushed up to her Mom, saying, “Fix it, Mommy!”
Also she couldn’t stop telling everyone about Superman’s cousin. She actually wrote, and began directing her sister and the neighbor girls, in a play about Supergirl. Since her little sister is blond, blue-eyed and pretty, and is already taking acting classes and loves them (whereas our budding comic book fan is brown-haired, blue-eyed and pretty and an aspiring writer) this motivated me to say, “One day the older sister will write a Supergirl movie…and her younger sister will star in it.”
Then I discovered the Digital Comic Museum, and all those old Mary Marvel comics. Unlike Supergirl: CAITEG, there is a fair amount of backstory necessary to understand Mary Marvel’s origin, especially since both Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr. show up in MM’s first appearance - she needed to know who those other characters were first. So I started her out with Captain Marvel’s first appearance in Whiz Comics #2. Then, since I wanted her to understand that this Captain Marvel guy is a big deal, one more of the later Cap stories, I chose “Crusher of Crime” from Whiz Comics #20. Right now she’s working on the 3-part introduction of Captain Marvel Jr.
Once that’s done it will be into the Mary Marvel stories. Which I dearly hope she loves.
Her mother runs off the pages in full color, then puts them in plastic sleeves, back-to-back, inside a 3-ring binder, so her daughter can have the experience of actually turning the pages in a “book” while reading her first-ever comic book stories.
Then one of my editors, to whom I’d been raving about how cool was the Digital Comic Museum, said to me, “Hey, what was the name of that website you told me about, with all the Golden Age comics? I’d like to check it out.” Of course, our reading interests are pretty different. I’m all about the superheroes, with a minor in horror, whereas he’s more a gadget freak, very into cars, very into military stuff, very into military equipment. And he likes old stuff, for instance he owns, and maintains, and drives, his own Model T Ford.
The next time I talked to him, he told me, “Hey, I checked out the Digital Comic Museum. I loved it! I downloaded a few comics from the ‘50s about Navy frogmen. Y’know, back then they didn’t call them SEALs.” The next time, it was, “I downloaded a few comics from the 50s about hotrodders. Of course they weren’t really about hot rods, it’s just the adventures of this group of friends who happen to be into hotrods.”
So I said, “Hey, there’s this obscure old series of backup stories from this thing called Crack Comics titled Spitfire. It’s not about the famous British fighter plane, this is actually an American pilot whose nickname is Spitfire because of his personality. I really enjoyed it. Does that sound like anything you’d be interested in?” He said yes, so I emailed him one Spitfire story. He loved it, so I began sending him one every weekday. I knew I’d run out of Spitfire in short order because there were never that many episodes published, so I recommended Airboy. I was a little iffy on that one, because I thought it might veer a bit too much into superhero territory for him, but he loved that, too. So for awhile I was sending him one each Airboy and Spitfire, every weekday. When I ran out of Spitfire, I segued into Sky Girl from Jumbo Comics which he absolutely LOVES.
Thusfar I’m batting 1,000 percent here.
When I run out of Airboy and Sky Girl – which will take months, thankfully these were both long-running – I’m going to transition over to Blackhawk and Torchy to continue his weekdaily daring aviator/hot–tempered sexy ditz fix.
I found it very interesting to get the impressions of a guy of middle years, who has never previously gotten into comic books, as far as what he likes about them when he eventually does. These days many folks opine that sales of comic books are down because of competition from video games, the ‘net, etc. My contention has always been that it’s a combination of few outlets, over-pricing, and the fact that the content of the vast majority of today’s comic books (a) requires a huge knowledge of backstory to understand what’s going on in any particular issue, (b) just isn’t particularly fun. So why does my editor find he’s enjoying his workdaily comic book story fix so much?
His comment was, “What comic books give me that no other form of entertainment does is brevity. I don’t want to spend weeks or months or years getting really great at a particular video game. I don’t want to commit days or weeks to reading a book. I don’t even want to spend two hours watching a movie. I just want to be entertained for half an hour. So I’ll read a couple of comic book stories.”
He’s one of those guys who likes to get to work at 7 AM, before almost anyone else, just spend time having his first cup of coffee, read email, settle in for the day before things really heat up. So these days he sits there, sipping on his first cup of coffee of the day, reading the Airboy and Skygirl stories I sent him the night before.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of the comic book industry today that, in order to find stories to engage the attentions of an intelligent 9-year-old girl, and an intelligent 56-year-old editor, I had to go back in time circa 70 years. But fortunately the Digital Comic Museum is there to make that a possibility.
