Comic
Books for the Jung at Heart
Robert M. Price
I still cringe! Whenever, that is, I think how many people
have told me over the years that their mom took the opportunity while they were
off at college or camp to throw away their comic book collections! I flinch even more, however, when I hear moms
still today snapping at their kids, “What are you reading that cheap trash
for?” Money figures into it, because if those earlier moms hadn’t trashed their
kids’ collections, they’d likely be worth a pile of money now. And because
today’s comics cost so much more (often a couple of bucks!), it’s not even
“cheap” trash anymore! And that makes the case I want to argue here even harder
to make, because I want to convince you that, while comic books are no longer
cheap, they sure aren’t trash either. Instead, I believe they may form a
crucial portion of your child’s education.
The Artist as a Young Fan
I admit to being a full 45 years old, but my interest in
comic books and superheroes is hardly some sort of mid-life crisis behavior
(no, rest assured, those particular lapses of judgment will have to wait for
other articles). I started reading the four color epics when I was, what? About
5 or 6 years old, I guess, when they cost a mere dime! A cheap ticket into an
alternate universe that turned out to have a lot more to do with this one than
I realized then. For some reason, back then I always pictured Superman as being
about as old as I am now. Superman, Batman, Captain America and the others were
authority figures for me. They were survivors of the so-called Golden Age of
comics, published through the forties and fifties, members, so to speak, of Tom
Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” When Stan Lee’s Spider-Man came along, I related
to him in a whole new way. Like me and many other young nerds, this superhero
was a teenager, and his paranormal abilities did not make these problems
vanish. Knowing himself superior to thick-headed bullies like Flash Thompson,
he nevertheless had little opportunity to vindicate himself against the jockish
taunting. All the jocks knew was that Spidey (Peter Parker) was a chemistry
major who kept to himself, absorbed not only by how to beat the latest tactics
of the Vulture and the Green Goblin, but also whether his part-time job could
enable him to pay for his aunt’s medicine. This was a unique sort of character
at the time, though a legion more soon copied him. And the unique experience
for the young reader was that, if Spider-Man’s mundane problems didn’t vanish
during the course of the comic book, neither did the reader’s! The hint was
clear that even the great triumph despite their drawbacks, and these drawbacks
are not always melodramatic. I never had to square off against Dr. Octopus, but
I did have to struggle with the ridicule of insensitive jocks. Spider-Man told
me the truth about me.
So I
found solace in the garishly colored pages. But that’s not all. I found many
other treasures that your children will surely find as well. For one thing, and
this alone is worth a lot more even than comics cost today): I became
interested in reading. I guess you could get something out of a comic book
just looking at the nice pictures, but I’ve never known anyone who tried it. I
read innumerable comics, actually read them, and they became a direct
path into reading real books. Specifically, around 1966 (the Turtles’ Happy
Together was just out on the radio), I was struck by a story (Archie
Goodwin wrote it, Steve Ditko, Spider-Man’s artist, drew it) in Creepy
that fell into a fantasy genre new to me, Sword and Sorcery. Not long
afterward, I chanced to spot a paperback book on the rack in the stationery
store where I bought my comics. It was the Lancer Books edition of Conan the
Warrior by Robert E. Howard. Little did I know this was the very creator of
the Sword and Sorcery genre. I could tell by the Frank Frazetta cover painting
that this was the sort of thing I had enjoyed so much in Creepy. I have
never been much of a reader before (it seemed to take forever to get through Freddy
the Detective), but Howard’s tales of Conan instantly galvanized me! My
Junior High (now they call it a “Middle School”) English teacher used to give
us index cards to record the few boring novels they forced us to read, but I
now asked for card after card to record the literally scores of titles by
Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, Lin Carter, etc., that I was consuming.
Oh I did my homework all right, all A’s, as a matter of fact.
It wasn’t
long before, both my imagination and my love of reading being ignited, I
widened my scope to other interests. Today I have two earned Ph.D. degrees.
This trajectory began way back when with Spider-Man. Spidey was a scientist,
got his powers during an experiment with a radioactive spider. Believe it or
not, this inspired me to want to become a research scientist. (Instead I’m a
biblical scholar, but it’s still research!) And not long ago, one of the most
exceptional students I ever had the pleasure of having in class told me that he
got his life together and began to try to perfect himself more and more every
day--after reading the origin of Spider-Man who taught him that with great
ability comes great responsibility.
I Only Know What I Read in the Funnies
So kids learn to love to read through the medium of
comics, since the dazzling artwork provides a good dose of sugar to make the
medicine go down. But what is the medicine? I have just anticipated one of
them: moral education. All cultures have hero myths, and the use of them is to
help us see life in certain terms, as if it followed a certain type of script.
It isn’t obvious that right prevails, that nice guys finish first, but that
seems to be the best pattern to have in mind as we face what might otherwise
seem like chaos. If we can be taught to envy the heroic quest, to admire the
kind of person who defends the rights of others, well then, little by little,
we might just be able to reshape the world in that image. We might be able to
live that way, though maybe not in Technicolor. In a day when there seems to be
a strange sheepishness about teaching values to children, and when TV makes
kids think adults are dolts, comic books just might be a secret weapon for
parents trying to sneak some moral nutrition past their children.
Something
else one learns pretty fast and thick in the comics is science, and science of
all kinds. Even linguistics, philosophy. I remember learning from Superman that
diamonds come from compressed coal. I learned that Prince Charming must
originally have sought a girl wearing a fur slipper, and that since the French
words for “glass” and “fur” are almost the same, the fairy tale evolved. I’ve
seen Nietzsche quoted a number of times, and Schopenhauer, and William Blake,
and the Gospel of Matthew. You don’t find that on network TV. You can get quite
an education reading those “funny books.”
Modern Mythology
Why do we read stories, any stories? Superman or Gone
with the Wind? William Tell or The Odyssey? I’ve already touched on
this briefly, but it’s worth pursuing. We do learn lessons from inspiring
examples, but it goes deeper than that. Joseph Campbell held that all
stories ultimately boil down to hero stories. If you look deeply enough you can
find the basic dynamic of a protagonist seeking some fulfillment, weathering
setbacks, overcoming the odds, and winning through. These stories are as
universal as the human race, and this isn’t coincidence, because the stories
function as scripts that condition us to set and seek a goal and thus to create
what no one else can give us: a purpose to life. We will, hopefully, begin to
write, to live, our own version of the story, filling in the blanks as we see
fit. If our lives are not about something, they will be a mere matter of
marking time, filling our days at random. And this meaning is seldom if ever
provided by some abstract idea, some concept, even a sublime one. No, meaning
is provided by narrative.
And to
get their point across, stories tend to paint with broad strokes, bold colors.
Superman is, of course Everyman. What do you think Clark Kent is doing there at
all? He is the mundane exterior of every person. Superman is the amazing
potential hidden inside us, so deeply hidden that sometimes neither we nor
others ever discover it. But the point of the stories is to help us discover
it. Occasionally a Superman story has the Man of Steel confounded, unable to
defeat a challenge, only to discover that Clark Kent can win the victory by a
less conspicuous route. Here the veil of allegory grows thin, and it is hard
not to see the point: everyone is Clark Kent, and Clark Kent is Superman.
If you
have read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, as everyone in my generation
seems to have done, you may have gotten close to the end, read over a thousand
pages, only to find an apparent anticlimax. You have accompanied Frodo,
Aragorn, Boromir and the others to the Crack of Doom and back, overcoming the
dread Sauron--only to return home to the Shire where a block-headed bunch of
bureaucrats is in the process of tastelessly remodeling the place. The heroes
thought they were home free and could rest by the fire. But no, there was
block-headedness to be dealt with. Nothing cosmic, pretty laughable after
dispensing with Sauron, right? But that’s the whole idea! We will never face
Sauron, but we will face his small-scale counterparts of mundane evil, so
mundane that we may not even think to call it evil. But these are the obstacles
we must overcome with all the heroic endurance we can muster.
Joseph
Campbell was a disciple of the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and Jung
explained just how these heroic quest stories have their impact upon formative
minds. It’s too bad Jung didn’t have a personal computer, because it would have
made his point easier to grasp. He
taught that deep inside us there is a set of inherited images, “archetypes,”
nothing spooky, just brain furniture, and that these images must emerge
gradually from our deep subconscious into our conscious mind. If they don’t, we
cannot mature. Some of the images are geometric and numerical: a square as a
symbol of stability, the circle as a sign of wholeness. Others are basic
literary characters, like the wise crone, who is embodied as the Fairy
Godmother, the Gypsy Fortune Teller, your own grandma. The dragon, the hero,
the prophet, etc. The archetypes appear over and over again all over the world
and across the ages, in fairy tales, myths, scriptures, Buddhist mandalas,
alchemist diagrams, Gnosticism, etc. We need ‘em. It’s as if the mind is a
computer, and in order to learn how to use all the programs, you have to learn,
one by one, what all of those icons on the screen mean. They are just iceberg
tips, calling up the deeply-laid programs your computer was born with. They’re
all there, but they won’t do you, the computer-user, any good if you don’t
access them. Myths are there to present the subconscious icons, archetypes, to
the conscious mind so you can click on them and get them running.
How do
you activate them? There are two basic ways, and religion specializes in both.
First there is ethics: like my student who read Spider-Man and realized
he had to act responsibly. He was living into the archetype by his daily
choices. Then there are rituals. Rituals are miniature symbolic
psychodramas. They produce certain results in us by having us act out a myth in
symbolic form. The actions of a ritual, like adult baptism, or chanting
scripture in one’s Bar Mitzvah, are not themselves moral actions in the mundane
world. Indeed, their very “strangeness” sets them apart in our minds and
memories so they can have an impact on us that no mundane act would have.
Religion offers us symbolic stories and ways of acting them out by which, Jung
said, we can access the archetypes. This is why Jung disagreed with his teacher
Sigmund Freud on the value of religion. Freud focused on the neurotic potential
of religion and how it protracts childhood for those who retreat into God
belief as an excuse for not thinking for themselves, not making their own
decisions. Jung did not deny many people use religion for unworthy reasons and
with bad results, but he thought Freud, ignoring the archetypes, failed to see
how religion could actually help the psyche mature.
I suggest
that in our day, when religious belief is for many no longer the simple matter
it once was, when children grow up in homes with mixed faith or none at all,
the modern myths of Wonder Woman, the Silver Surfer, Batman, and the rest have
very much the same power of traditional religious stories. Granted, this is
partly because the comic books overtly borrow from the Bible and from Greek and
Norse mythology, but just as often they don’t. They are simply the same sort of
thing. And comic books even have a kind of advantage over the traditional
religious stories.
When we
read comic books we know we are under no obligation to believe the events
depicted there actually happened. This fact allows and even encourages the free
soaring of the imagination. Comic fans often make up their own
super-adventures, and even act them out (ritually!) with a towel for a super-cape.
(Luckily, not too many fans my age do this!) Some decide they could tell
stories just as well or better. And that’s how the next generation of comics
creators emerge. In many religious communities, by contrast, the imaginative
fire of even the most spectacular dimensions story out of scripture can be
deadened, leadened, if the child (or adult!) is told he or she must believe the
story really happened. In that case, the story becomes a clamp, a vise,
something to restrict and imprison the imagination. But in the case of comics,
there is no such dogmatic agenda. I am, remember, a Bible scholar. I love these
stories and spend my life studying and expounding them. But they have become so
sacred that we are often afraid to touch them, to treat them as stories ought
to be treated. And one of the things scripture tells us is that our very soul,
our selfhood, will be in peril if we do not keep alive the child within us.
Comic books help us keep that eager child active within us, and if we start our
children on these wholesome works early enough, we will be both guiding them
into a healthy maturity and keeping the flower of their childlike spirit
alive.