The Importance of Comics: Part I - My Journey with Comics
- Luke Evans
- Dec 26, 2020
- 15 min read
Updated: Jan 24, 2021
Through my younger years, people were always dismissive of comics as an art form, and as a form of literature. I was laughed at by peers for buying and reading them. I have had adults dismiss them as useless funny books with no value.
Are they right? What is the importance of comics for a reader today? Is it a true form of literature? What is their real value?
Pic Ref: Wired.com
These first two sections are long. They are the most personal. They explain my history with comics and why they meant the world to me growing up and still do today. After this, there'll be a selection of smaller posts, each covering a different aspect of the topic for me.
My maternal grandparents died in 1985 (Grandad) and 1988 (Nana) respectively. I was not allowed to go to the funerals, but these were my first experiences with death. They hit me in the way of a young child trying to work out what it all means. I see the same look in my daughters’ eyes these days and I wonder if they will hold onto their early experiences of their first exposure to this type of pain and death forever too.
In the early 1990’s, my parents bought a small sandwich shop/corner store in the industrial centre of Newcastle, NSW. I used to go with them to work on Saturdays. I would have said I “worked” with them… I doubt they would have said the same thing. Anyway, after a short time of “working”, I’d get tired of the stresses of work-life and I’d ask to go for a walk in town. My parents were indulgent in this…I suspect it was better for them to have me gone as well! All jokes aside, they let me go off into the city alone. My eldest sister says they always gave us wings to do whatever we wanted to do and I guess they did. Looking back, there’s a few times I would’ve preferred them to reign me in, but they never did. They let us find our feet.
Anyway, I quickly found my favourite shops in Newcastle. My most favourite store was a small used bookstore. It’s still there and the man who owns it now is the same guy. It’s 2020 when I write this – I went to his shop for the first time in 1991. I often wonder what he thinks of that, being in the same place as he was back then. He has never seemed happy about it, if I’m honest. I would hope, though, that he would know that his books bring pleasure to people, that they make people happier. They have made me happier and I will always be grateful for that. Thank you for those years of service. I have appreciated you and what you have brought to my life.
And what was that?
Well, it was at this bookstore that I bought my very first comics. I still have some of them.
These comics, following so close on the heels of the deaths of my maternal grandparents, introduced me to the emotions surrounding death. I remember reading the comic below and rushing to my father in fear one night. I sat on his lap and told him that I did not want to lose my parents…
This comic, one of the very earliest ones that I bought, was called "Superman the Comic: The Life Story of Superman”, by writer Martin Pasco, and artists Curt Swan and Frank Chiaramonte (©DC Comics, 1980). It showed Superman guiding a tour through a newly established Metropolis Superman Museum and explaining each of the exhibits to the people following him. As he does, he reflects on his life, from his roots on Krypton to his early life in Smallville where he became the first version of Superboy.
These days, this story has been changed and this version of Superman is not the one we see in the comics now. Superboy was overwritten in the newer version - there is no original Superboy in the current story. The new version of Superman had Clark Kent come to Metropolis and adopt his super-persona there. Today, Superboy is a different character entirely. Anyway, at the time, this story was canon.
Back to the story-proper. Superman took the visitors around the Museum and talked them through the bits he was able to share. For the secret identity bits, he remembers what occurred and the reader gets that part of the story through his internal monologue narration.
He remembers when his Earth-parents became sick, and as the young Superboy he scoured the world for a cure but could not save them. He was the most powerful person in the world and he could not save his parents' lives.
I love the image above of the “Powerless Superman”, with shoulders slumped and body shaking. The broken boy with the power of a god who can do nothing to stop the deaths of the ones he loves the most.
“In the name of God, what kind of Superman is that!”
Another sad and powerless image. Superboy leaves Smallville with fanfare, but Clark Kent leaves and nobody is there for him:
Pic: "Superman the Comic: The Life Story of Superman”, by writer Martin Pasco, and artists Curt Swan and Frank Chiaramonte (©DC Comics, 1980).
And so, that was my introduction to both comics and death and I suppose that these two were always going to remain linked for me. As I grew, I learned many things from my parents, my family, my school, and my religion. But it’s comics that taught me how to READ and FEEL together.
Today, I experience life, music, movies, and reading in this way. If a book does not make me feel, I won’t read it. If a song or a movie can’t make me feel, I am not interested. That is the impact of comics in my life.
Pic: From "Superman Batman” # 12, artist Michael Turner, writer Jeph Loeb, colourist Peter Steigerwald, ©DC Comics, 2004
I’ll jump forward a little. In primary school, I met a friend who also loved comics – Jeremy. I can’t remember which came first. I’m pretty sure I had discovered the bookstore and comics first, but the next bit is hazy. EITHER he introduced me to the X-Men or I bought X-Men Vol 2 #1 and then found out he was a fan… I don’t want to say definitively which way it worked because I can’t remember. It doesn't really matter which way it was.
Either way, I bought X-Men #1 from a Newsagents in Newcastle on one of my work-avoiding walks through the city. The Newsagent was owned by a family who I knew. I went to school with their sons… but that is neither here nor there.
- Pic: Marvel.fandom.com , the cover to X-Men #1 , by Jim Lee et al, (©Marvel Comics, 1993).
My friend and I loved the X-Men. We would make up stories together and we would draw our own comics together. They were universally crap. Although, he did teach me the basics of writing a screenplay and we both had a crack at a good story or two each. We had some good ideas and this time is when I became interested in reading and telling stories and in writing.
Pic: The cover to Daredevil #296 from September in 1991. Cover art by Lee Weeks, et al.
(©Marvel Comics, 1993).
This was the first comic I bought after meeting Jeremy. We were on a school trip to the Australian Capital Territory and I bought it there. Jeremy saw me reading it on the bus and that was that. We clicked.
X-Men and The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Jumping ahead to 2020, I want to explain something:
I did not realise in 1991 the impact that comics had on my life. I do now.
In 2016, I convinced my 9-year-old daughter to sit with me and read the 1990’s X-Men. As I read with her, it took me back to the early 1990s and to my next journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, which had involved these comics too.
At the same time that this X-Men series came out, my family was heavily involved in the Catholic Church. I don’t know what I believe now, in that regard, but I know that I was influenced greatly by my religion at that time. Its imprint stays with me still and I am so grateful for the beautiful things it taught me, despite what I might think of the finer details of the Church today.
I have always known that comics were important to me. They were connected to my life at the time when I started reading them and my love of them moving forward. That being said, what I failed to recognise was the full impact of comics in my life at the time of that first reading. I knew I loved them, I have kept them and re-read them since that time. But I never knew the depth of what they taught me back then until I sat down to re-read them with my daughter.
It sounds confusing... I will explain...
Moving on to the main attraction of my life’s story, the time that affected everything that was to come:
In 1993, my mother was diagnosed with what they called a “Stage 4, metastasised non-small carcinoma” in her lung. They believed the cancer had spread to her brain and on the way had stopped off in her lymph nodes. It was inoperable and it was definitely terminal.
Pic: From X-men #22 (p11), July 1993. “The Mask Behind the Façade”.
Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
Over the next month, Mum slipped downhill rapidly and was on her deathbed. She had opted to have no treatment and had decided to spend her last days with her family. It’s a complicated story and one that dips heavily into the religious. Mum was very religious. I struggle with it these days, I admit. There is more to this story than what I will write here and I just can’t reconcile all the disparate elements. I have tried. I am still trying. But these are the things I want to share with you here:
Firstly, Mum WAS dying. There was no doubt. It was a rare and very aggressive cancer. My father had to care for her body, she could not clean and bathe herself. I was thirteen. I don’t know how much help I was, but Dad and I forged a bond in this time that I am eternally grateful for.
Pic: From X-Men #27 (p20), September 1993. “Between Hope and Sorrow”. Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Richard Bennet. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
When Mum was sick, many people would come to see her. Visitors would invariably come in sombre – after all, coming to see a dying woman is not a pleasant experience. Given time, however, we would begin to hear sounds of conversation coming from her room. I remember the bedroom a little – Mum propped up in the bed, with various friends and family around her – but the room I remember the most is the kitchen. Dad and I would go to the kitchen when her visitors came. We would make tea and coffee and some nibblies for Mum and her guests.
But the kitchen – that God-damned kitchen – I remember it so well. I remember preparing the food and the drink. I remember the fridge and where it sat, I remember the tiny little recess that my dad used as "the Naughty Corner", where he sent my nephew when he was being cheeky. And I remember the one and only day that the stress broke my father and he told me that he knew we were losing her. He cried then, that one time with me in the whole ten months. I am sure he had many such moments, but he kept them all from me - except that one.
Pic: From X-Men #24 (p13), September 1993. “Between Hope and Sorrow”. Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
Dad and one of his friends tell a story of them having a commissary Scotch together and of giving me a few too. That was in the kitchen too, but I can’t remember it myself. Dad says that after this they had to go and pick Mum up from the hospital. She was sitting with a nun when he arrived at the hospital. He told them that he had been spending some time with the spirit. She said “The Holy Spirit is wonderful,” and Dad replied, “Not that spirit. The spirit of Black Douglas”, which was his brand of Scotch.
As mentioned, the other thing I remember is the laughter that would come from her room. The visitors would come in, so incredibly sad to see her like this, and we would withdraw to the kitchen. And we would hear them laugh. It was something kind of amazing to us, kitchen-dwellers that we were, that visitors would come expecting death and would leave somehow rejuvenated by that space. Mum said that people opened up to her because they felt that it was the end – because it was her end and the end of their journey WITH her, so there was a freedom that they brought with them. There was an air of “nothing left to lose”, I guess. They opened up to her, shared their secrets, confided in her. She had said that she felt so important at that time – because other people would come to her with their stories and she would listen. That was it – she would listen.
- Pic: From "Superman: Grounded" Part 1 by J. Michael Straczynski and Eddy Barrows.
© DC Comics, 1993.
When Mum was sick, I withdrew from the family and friends a lot. I would like to know people were around and to hear their voices, but I didn’t want to talk to them so much. I actually still find “discovery” conversations ("How are you? What have you been doing? Where do you work?" Etc, etc) difficult... I don't like them. And I’m still pretty awkward and quiet with people. I would box up my emotions and I didn’t want to talk about it.
And, looking back, I realise now that the man in the strip below taught me how I was going to deal with it all:
Pic: From X-men #20 (p 2), July 1993.“Digging In The Dirt”. Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. © Marvel Comics, 1993.
My Dad said I was a tower of strength for him. I wasn’t, I don’t think, I just didn’t know what I could do about it all. To me, this cancer was a death sentence and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Being religious, people said to pray for her to get better. To me this was a waste of time. That wasn’t going to happen. This cancer wasn't something people recover from. So, I had two prayers instead: The first was just simply for God’s will to be done – whatever it was. The second was this one from Michael Leunig: God, grant me the strength to hold on and the strength to let go.
As I said earlier, in 2016 I had started reading the X-Men comics that I had from this time with my daughter. I started to get emotional with every issue because the things that the characters were doing and the way they dealt with their problems is the way that I dealt with my problems. I never realised how much they taught me about not only morality and virtue but also about dealing with pain.
Pic: From X-men #22 (p11), July 1993. “The Mask Behind the Façade”.
Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
The following page discusses how my favourite character – Scott Summers, Cyclops - deals with the pain in his life… It is eerily familiar to me now. I realised that this was what I did, what I always did to protect myself, and to deal with pain in my life.
Cyclops was my favourite character and I admired his strength. I see now, too, that I have emulated his coping measures in my life as well:
Pic: From X-men #23 (p30), August 1993. “Leaning Towards Oneself”.
Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
What follows is an example of how the characters were written to deal with their own pain. One of the characters, a young girl named Illyana Rasputin had just died and her friend Jubilation Lee is processing the loss.
Pic: From X-men #24 (p13), September 1993. “Between Hope and Sorrow”.
Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
Pic: From X-men #24 (p20), September 1993. “Between Hope and Sorrow”.
Written by Fabian Nicieza and pencils by Andy Kubert. ©Marvel Comics, 1993.
Mum did not die of the cancer at that time. Through something I can only explain as miraculous, Mum recovered and her cancer disappeared without any treatment at all. Why and how are questions I’ll never know the real answer to. Mum had religious explanations and for a long time I shared them. Now... I don't know. Whatever it was, it was a miracle. It's something we can't explain, something the doctors couldn't explain. That fits my definition of a miracle - it's something amazing that science and medicine cannot explain.
This quote below is by a comic and is played for laughs, obviously, but he is definitely on to something here:
I discovered the key to happiness, it's pretty easy. You just need to loosen up your definition of what a miracle can be... Everybody's always going real top shelf with miracles, you know, always like "What's a miracle?" "I don't know, like a statue that cries blood or somethin'!" Turn it down, turn it way down. All a miracle is, is the universe letting you know it can still surprise you. That's all it is. Letting you know it can still do something that you never thought of. I experienced a miracle recently. Ahh, the miracle I experienced was, I burnt my laundry. Now I should've been pissed, but I didn't even know that you could do that! Do you understand that feeling? I was just at the laundromat, holding a meteorite of my favourite t-shirts that I should've been upset about, except instead I was overcome with a sense of wonderment. Just looking at everybody else, like, "Did you know this could even happen?! I put the same coins in the same machines as everybody else. You all got fresh laundry. I created a new element for the universe!!" That was followed by another half hour of me just yelling out, "I AM THE ALCHEMIST!!" And then.. that's when the police were called..."
There's another cool quote I found at some stage after Mum's sickness:
“Health is not a condition of matter, but of mind”
- Mary Baker G. Eddy
I think, whatever happened, that this has a lot to do with it. I don’t know if it’s important what you believe in, exactly, but I do think it’s important to believe in something, to have something to live for. And she had something to live for. Her daughter was getting married. She had grandchildren being born. I was in high school. She wanted to see all of these things though. She was angry that she had been dealt this hand at 49 years old. She had been a smoker and had quit years before, and now this. Mum had tried to be a good, Christian woman all of her life and now, just as life was going well this happened.
It is fair to say that her mind was not submitting to that.
Mum believed that she had given her life to a higher purpose, both as a religious woman and as a wife and mother, and she was not going to be sent home to die.
Anyway, whatever it was, ten months later, Mum had fully recovered with no medical treatments whatsoever. Doctors couldn’t explain it but were told they had to call it “remission”, because it could come back. Normally, if it is going to come back, it will do so within 7 years.
Mum stayed cancer-free for 23 years after this. She swore she would never get cancer again.
She was wrong.
Mum passed away in 2016 from a different growth of cancer. She had lived for 23 extra years. She had been at that wedding and had danced. She saw me finish high school and uni after that. She saw grandchildren and great-grandchildren born. She had lived.
We were told it was not the same cancer, it was not in the same places. This was something else. After they got the news that there was nothing more that they do, Dad drove her home and stopped at the family doctor. Mum said she'd wait in the car while he went in. She was calm. She was tired. And he knew - she had accepted it then. There was no anger this time.
After she passed away, Dad and I found a diary she had started. There were only a few entries in it. It was a book I had bought her. One side of the cover had a picture of a sunny day and said "Day Dreams" the other side had a picture of night-time, titled "Night Dreams". In the night-time side, she had written that if she ever got sick like that again, she would not fight it.
And she didn't.
Mum lived with the cancer throughout that year, but she accepted that this time there would not be any second chances. This time, I think she knew it had her. Maybe, it was an acceptance that we had only delayed the inevitable in 1993. Whether you see that first recovery as miraculous or not - and I do - all stories must come to an end and Mum's ended in late 2016, 23 years after being told she only had weeks to live. She saw new generations born into her family in that time and lived a wonderful life after the first cancer had threatened to take it all away. We were all grateful for the extra time she was given here with us.
That was a miracle all by itself.
Pic: From "Superman Batman” # 12, artist Michael Turner, writer Jeph Loeb,
colourist Peter Steigerwald, ©DC Comics, 2004
In 1993, as a 13-year-old, I struggled greatly with Mum’s imminent death, the death that never came. The lessons of that time made me who I was going to be for the rest of my life. I was a very sensitive kid. When Mum eventually did die in 2016, I did not break as some of those around me expected.
It is strange. I think I broke 23 years prior when she was sick the first time.
At that time, I became a philosopher and a poet and just like Cyclops, I wrapped the pain and grief around me like a protective blanket. Sometimes today, I still do this.
Now, did Cyclops teach me this, or was I just seeing a kindred spirit in the way we both dealt with the pain? I don't know, really and, more importantly, I don't really care. We were linked by that shared understanding of pain and how we chose to deal with it...
And now, I have shared Cyclops' story with my daughter. I hope she treasures it, learns from it, and uses it in her life too. I know it has influenced me greatly and continues to today...
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This article will be continued in:-
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NOTE: The pictures used here have been sourced from different internet sites, always linked to under the picture. In the case of comic panels, the original issue numbers and creators are listed, as well as the company that owns them. All rights remain with the original creators and have been used here for entertainment and educational purposes only.
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