Learning From Comic Books--And the Artists Who Drew Them

Like most male boomers my age, I can remember back to a time when a comic book cost 12 cents instead of $3, a time before the adventures of impossibly muscular heroes in tights and masks were subjected to literary deconstructionism worthy of Jacques Derrida. (If you've ever been amused by The Simpsons character Comic Book Guy, you know what I'm talking about.) Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we all spent hours hanging out at the magazine rack at G.C. Murphy's, hoping that the clerk wouldn't chase us out the door before we'd finished thumbing through the latest issue of The Fantastic Four or Justice League of America.

Nerdy nonconformist that I was, I was particularly devoted to the obscure, long-ago-defunct Tower Comics' T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, an intrepid band of United Nations employees who secretly battled a race of super-powered subterranean humanoids commanded by the evil Overlord, who were bent on the total destruction of human civilization. For a child of the Cuban Missile Crisis who still had nightmares about mushroom clouds, it was comforting to imagine that a few brave heroes could form a bulwark against the unthinkable. Beyond that, my favorite among the agents was NoMan, a frail, ailing scientist who'd transferred his mind into a butt-kicking android body, and could shift his consciousness wirelessly among several duplicate bodies at will. I used to fantasize about how cool it would be to pull that body-transfer trick in the middle of boring fifth-grade math class, and shift into a duplicate of myself at the candy store a few streets away.

But it wasn't until recently that, due to the wonder of Google, I came across Michael T. Gilbert's intriguing biographical sketch of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents creator Wally Wood and learned that the superhero adventures I loved as a boy were the product of a troubled virtuoso's midlife desperation. Wood, as it turned out, was a oft-struggling, alcoholic artist who'd finally landed a decent-paying gig at Marvel Comics, where, among other things, he dreamed up Daredevil's distinctive red costume. But he grew frustrated and despondent at brainstorming concepts and even making up stories, without being paid or credited for those contributions. The fledgling T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents was Woods' own baby, his chance for total creative control. I wish that I could report that Wood went on to achieve fantastic success. Despite a cadre of loyal fans and critical praise from other artists, the book eventually went under and Wood, despondent over his failing health, eventually took his own life in 1981, at age 54. Still, he's remembered as a visionary, albeit a tragic one, in this tribute by comics critic Dan Nadel.

But as critic Jeet Heer details in his insightful essay, "The Mid-Life Crisis of the Great Commercial Cartoonists," the pattern of comics artists being spurred by midlife crises to greater creativity is a fairly common one.

And rather than succumb to despair, some triumph. One happier example was Will Eisner, creator in the 1930s and 1940s of the influential comic The Spirit. By the late 1970s, when he was in his 60s, Eisner had evolved into a publisher of educational comic books for the U.S. Army and big companies, more of a businessman than an artist. But comics aficionados and younger artists convinced Eisner that he should return to drawing and writing, and try something new.

Eisner thought back to one of his own youthful artistic influences, Lynd Ward, whose avant-garde wordless novels were told entirely in woodcut illustrations. Eisner decided to try writing a comic peopled by ordinary non-super-powered characters, grappling with existential questions. The result was 1978's A Contract With God And Other Tenement Stories, perhaps the first modern graphic novel. Eisner went on to create a series of similar books about Jews and other immigrant groups in New York, and to daringly reinterpret Herman Melville's Moby Dick and the character Fagin from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist in graphic form. Shortly before his death in 2005 at age 87, he published his final work, The Plot, an expose of the anti-semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

"I don't like to go back," Eisner once explained, according to an excellent recent article on the artist by graphic novel critic Christopher Irving. "I'm constantly in a forward momentum, looking to explore...I just don't have time to think about, or wishing I could go back to something I've done before."

Will Eisner is a wonderful reinvention role model for boomers. His work is proof that even if you've made creative concessions to make a living, you still can go back to your roots and re-imagine your early influences, and then create something original and visionary. We should all give it a try.