MIND CANDY
Dedication
Dedicated to Glenn Yeffeth and Leah Wilson
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
Introduction
In 2002 a fellow named Glenn Yeffeth contacted me about writing an essay for a book he was editing, to be called Seven Seasons of Buffy, about the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” That turned out to be the first in a series of similar anthologies about various pop culture phenomena, called the Smart Pop series, and I got invited to write for most of them. I didn’t always have anything to say about a given subject, so I turned down several of those invitations, but I wrote a total of fifteen essays for the series before I finally got somewhat burned out and stopped; fourteen of them were published, while the fifteenth, about Wonder Woman, was intended for an anthology that got canceled.
Writing them was fun. I always tried to find something to say about the work in question that I had never seen anyone say before. In some cases, given the huge amount of fannish writing that already existed, that was a real challenge. I may not have always succeeded.
I usually tried to be funny, or at least amusing, as well—not always, but usually.
I thought some of those essays were pretty good. I kind of regretted that most of my regular readers didn’t see most of them—I mean, someone who doesn’t care about “Grey’s Anatomy” wasn’t about to buy an entire book about the show just because I had an essay in it. Eventually, it occurred to me that there was an obvious solution: Collect them all into a single volume.
While I was assembling it, I realized there wasn’t any good reason not to include other old pop culture essays and articles I’d written, or for that matter new ones. Some of those old pieces had appeared in obscure, low-circulation venues, where almost no one saw them, so here was a chance to give them a larger audience. So I dug through all the articles and columns I’d written since 1984, and found a few I thought were worth reprinting.
(1984 was my cut-off because my seventy or so published articles and columns from before that were written on a typewriter—I got my first computer in August, 1984—and therefore weren’t available in a handy form.)
I limited this collection to pieces about popular culture, so all the articles about writing and publishing and collecting were excluded; I may put them in another book someday, but not this one. Plain old reviews of books or movies also got cut, as did articles that were just history, without any original angle. (I was somewhat startled by how many straight histories I’d written, mostly about comic books.)
I’ve updated several of these essays, as many were written before the work in question concluded, or contained material that hasn’t aged well—the Lone Ranger essay, for example, originally included a critique of the 1981 movie starring Klinton Spilsbury, and really, who cares about that anymore? Some stuff is still a bit dated, even after editing, but I’ll just have to live with that.
These aren’t academic papers or scholarly studies; they’re just for entertainment. You won’t find footnotes or bibliographies or annotations, just me throwing ideas around. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
—Lawrence Watt-Evans
Takoma Park, 2012
Comic Books
Dr. Wertham, E.C. Comics, and My Misspent Youth
Revised; original version published in Penguin Dip, a fanzine, in 1989
Once upon a time an editor invited me to write an article for him, and I asked what sort of article he’d like to see me write. He, knowing of my interest in E.C. comics, suggested the title above.
I think there were some false assumptions involved here. I was well past my misspent youth by the time I first heard of E.C. or Dr. Wertham. Still, here’s my story.
I was born in 1954, fourth of six kids. All three of my older siblings, by the time I was old enough to notice, read comic books, mostly DC superheroes and Dell adventure stuff—Turok, Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, that sort of thing. Little Lulu and some other kiddie comics, too.
All the comic books in the house were treated as communal property; whoever bought one could read it first, but then it got passed around, and when everyone had read it it went up to a box in the attic. Periodically, on boring rainy days, somebody would go up to the attic and haul down a stack of old comics to re-read.
When I was five, late in 1959 or early in 1960, I desperately wanted to learn to read so I could read those comic books that sat around the house so temptingly. I’d learned the alphabet in kindergarten, and one day the teacher was teaching us a song that she’d written on the blackboard, something about “K-k-katy, beautiful Katy,” and the concept of each letter representing a sound abruptly dawned on me.
I suddenly realized that maybe I could read, since I knew all the letters.
When I got home I got out the comic book that most fascinated me, a coverless old one with bright purple spaceships and trees with faces and domed cities in it, and I sat down and read it, skipping words that weren’t spelled phonetically.
So much for the arguments that comic books keep kids from learning to read!
That comic book, by the way, stuck in my memory, and twenty years later I tracked it down and bought a copy. It’s Adventures into the Unknown #105, published by the American Comics Group in 1956.
Once I started, I was a voracious reader. By the time I was seven I had gone through all the comic books that my sibs had accumulated, and I had to start buying my own.
I picked up the first issue of X-Men secondhand, for a nickel, about six months after it came out. I read the first Justice League adventures, which Marian had bought. I liked superheroes. I also liked everything else—I plowed through Marian’s Turok and Lone Ranger and Jody’s Little Lulu and Superboy and all the rest of it, loving all of it. About my favorite was Strange Adventures, a science fiction title.
Then one day I picked up a secondhand copy of Tales to Astonish #13 (I know the issue because I tracked it down later), and discovered monster comics.
That comic book had four or five stories in it. The cover story was about “Groot, the Thing from Planet X!,” a giant walking tree. Then there was a creepy one about a guy obsessed with finding the abominable snowman who becomes the abominable snowman, and one about a guy who gets turned into a wooden statue, and… well, I don’t remember the others for sure anymore, but this was my first exposure to scary stuff in visual form.
I had nightmares for about a week.
I loved it.
If that sounds contradictory, it isn’t really. I had nightmares a lot, about all kinds of things. Even a silly Supergirl story about a red monster so gigantic you only see its feet gave me nightmares.
I started looking for other scary comics, but didn’t find much. Most Marvel monster comics were just dumb, and the Charlton ghost comics, too, and the DC “mystery” comics I came across were even worse. Dell did a few that I liked—my favorite was a one-shot giant called Universal Pictures Presents Dracula, The Mummy, and Other Stories. (Catchy title, huh?) That one gave me nightmares, too.
It seemed to me at the time that there ought to be even scarier comic books than that, and more of them. I wondered why DC and Marvel and Charlton and ACG never had any werewolves or vampires or anything in their spooky comics. I couldn’t find any, though, and eventually I gave up.
Time marched on. By 1969 I wasn’t paying much attention to comics any more.
Then in 1974 I started collecting them because I discovered that there was money in it; I picked up a first-printing Classics Comics #1 at a yard sale for $4.25, as a curiosity, and sold it to a collector for $60.00.
I started buying up practically