Hey Kids, Comics! Childhood Comic Book Cultures in Vermont 1950-1995
Over the last decade or so Vermont Folklife has explored the potential of comics to serve as a medium for documentary storytelling, published two nonfiction comics anthologies, and undertaken two interview projects that look at the connections between Vermont, cartooning and comic book collecting. In 2016, Andy—our Associate Director and Archivist (and resident comic nerd)—interviewed a group of Vermont cartoonists to learn about how being from, and living in, Vermont shaped their work. Just this summer Andy took on another effort exploring childhood engagement with comic books in Vermont through the memories of adults in their 40s-70s who actively purchased comic books here from the 1950s-early 1990s. Andy presented a short paper about this recent project at this year’s American Folklore Society conference. With the Non-Fiction Comics Festival coming up this weekend, we decided to share Andy’s paper where he (and the people he interviewed) talk about how comics served as a launching pad for their childhood art-making.
Hey Kids, Comics! Childhood Comic Book Cultures in Vermont 1950-1995
For the past several years I’ve been thinking a lot about comics–in particular about how to connect my interest in them with my work as a folklorist, and how best to engage ethnographically with the people who create, consume and collect them. The project from which this presentation emerges draws on several key sources of inspiration. Back in 2021 I had the honor of serving on the master’s committee of Azade Najafian, whose thesis, “Ethnography of Reading Comic Books” got me thinking deeply about the idea of engaging ethnographically with comics readers and collectors. In fact, since I originally directed her to several of the people she interviewed–most friends of mine–there is a good deal of overlap between the people who participated in her work and mine. Thank you, Azade for your thoughtful engagement with the topic and for getting the ball rolling.
For me, contemporary folklore resides at the intersection of vernacular cultural expression and mass media. This perspective guides much of my thinking about comics in relation to folklore studies, and informs how I’ve been connecting with people who are drawn (often passionately) to comics from all sorts of overlapping perspectives - as an abstracted form, as a system of communication, and as expressive and material culture. At this time I’ve interviewed nine people about comics and childhood in Vermont. The interviews cover a range of topics related to memories of comics and comic books–early encounters, how they acquired and interacted with them as material objects, how they connected to their content–both the form generally, to narratives and the characters depicted in them, their reading and collecting practices, and the social world–or more often lack thereof–that framed their relationships to the material.
I’m focusing here on introducing one topic brought up by several interviewees: the childhood practice of using published comics as springboards for creating visual art–including duplicating published characters and scenes, recasting stories from print comics, and creating their own unique work inspired by the comics they were reading. Five of the project participants described comics serving a significant role in their childhood creative practice and art making. Of these five, four talked about creating their own comics and comic books. Two, Andrew and John, are in their early 50s and began reading comics in the mid 1970s. Two, Stephen and Rick are in their late 60s and early 70s respectively, and began reading comic books in the mid-to-late 1950s.
Stephen introduced his use of comics as source material for drawing through reference to a particular comic book cover: “I walked in and the spinner rack had the Classics Illustrated World Around Us dinosaurs comic. So this would have been 1959. I was four. And I really wanted it. Had this amazing cover painting with a triceratops and tyrannosaur facing off. And Mom bought it for me because it was a Classics Illustrated. So that was the first comic I asked for, and it was bought for me and we went home and I--not just fell in love with the comic, but I, I wore it out copying the artwork. I was already drawing at that time. And the pages were falling out. I hadn't torn them out, they were just, you know, it was a square bound comic, so they were just falling apart.” When he got older, Stephen started making comics with a neighbor: “my next door neighbor, my best friend Mitch…he drew the first comic I ever saw a person draw, with my own eyes. He folded…two or three pieces of paper together. I don't remember a stapler. And he drew ‘Attack of the Giant Tse Tse Flies.’”…So Mitch drew his version of one of those strange insect movies, you know, and that blew my mind…And so I realized, ‘Oh, I can draw comics, too.’ And Mitch was a better cartoonist than I was at that time, but I stuck with it.”
The World Around Us was an early nonfiction comic series published by Gilbertson, best known for their Classics Illustrated line.
Panel detail from World Around Us Prehistoric Animals
Rick describes how his engagement with comic books—as a source of inspiration for art making—differed from the way other kids related to them, “…most kids would read a comic two or three times and then didn’t want anything to do with it, but I was teaching myself to draw…and I was studying the panels and like, ‘how did they do this? How can they make these lines look like–you know, a certain expression on a person? And how do you make a woman look beautiful and sexy and like, what's this crazy thing Jack Kirby's doing with these little blob black circles? … And I was making comics all the time.” Like Stephen, Rick’s early comics were created in partnership with others–in Rick’s case with his younger brother Michael and older brother Tom: “Tom had started this tradition of making his own comic books, and he had the Flag Comic Book company. And so as a really young kid, probably second or third grade, I started Sun Comics and, you know, making my own little comics.”
An example of Rick's juvenilia from middle/high school.
In contrast to Stephen, whose social interaction around comic artmaking was limited to a single close friend, and Rick whose comic-creation activity focused on siblings, for Andrew, drawing and copying from comics had a broader social component, “I mean, that was something that I was kind of known for. I would bring comics to school and I would draw, like, the covers and stuff. Like, recreate. Tried different scenes. And that was kind of where my art developed…just sort of copying comic book pages.”
Reflecting on my own childhood I remarked, “So I didn't realize that you were sort of the kid who ‘drew good’”--meaning the child in the class recognized and respected for their artistic ability. He responded, “I mean, I guess at that time. Yeah...I was the kid who ‘drew good.’ Definitely in, like, junior high and younger.”
A recent depiction by John of his younger self.
However, while Andrew shared one aspect of his artistic practice with a receptive audience, other aspects of it were private and tied to home. Both Andrew and John were the youngest children in their households. Andrew’s nearest sibling was 14 years older, and John’s 7. Both describe themselves as introverted kids who spent a lot of time by themselves. For them, reading and collecting comics provided an intellectual and emotional outlet. Creating their own comics inspired by their reading intertwined with aspects of solitary play at home–albeit from different perspectives. In describing the comics he made in childhood, Andrew stated: “They were all based on--and this is the thing…I had these knock off Legos and I would build a little superhero team with them…And I did draw a few mini comics kind of based on them. But yeah, I was really spending more time just playing with them.” Creating these comics became an extension of Andrew’s solitary, imaginative play–narrative games influenced by his passion for superhero comic books. For Andrew, play served as a catalyst for artmaking.
For John, artmaking transformed into play: “I would sit around with a pad of tracing paper and comics and try to learn to draw that way. I remember too, sometimes I would make these very detailed tracings of images that are comics or panels, color them on the tracing paper, glue them onto a piece of cardboard and then cut them out and then arrange them around my room. Like, whether it was making my own artwork to hang on the walls or even sort of shuffling the panels in different ways to make my own stories. Yeah, like, if I couldn't have an action figure of said superhero, I would at least make a stiff, tangible panel that I could then play with.” John’s artistic practice led to the creation of objects he could interact with in various ways–posing and positioning them to arrange scenes, and laying out copied panels and reshuffling their order to create his own stories from them. While John did not draw his own comics until high school, his practice of recasting printed stories by reorganizing their structures and generating new narratives from them brought forth a similar result. He was, in essence, creating comics–and doing so in a way that, quite literally, deconstructed them narratively and physically, allowing him to recreate them in new ways.
As an ethnographer, I think of folklore as a fundamental aspect of human behavior–one that ties together creativity and shared identity and expresses them through familiar and easily recognizable forms: a clay pot, a basket, a story that opens with the phrase “once upon a time,” or even mass media like comics. When we think about folklore as behavior–as the actions that lead to the story or song or the pot or the basket, rather than the things themselves–we can then also acknowledge some important aspects of mass media and how human beings in the present interact with it. Certainly contemporary mass media deeply informs individual and shared identity. In his important 2016 article, “Comics as Folklore,” Daniel Peretti explores the interplay between various perspectives on folklore and the medium of comics, doing so through the lens of the folkloresque. Peretti suggests that vernacular engagement with mass media can challenge, reframe and make meaningful our personal and shared relationships to these forms and their content. Through the folkloric process we can assert ownership over our identities by recasting commodified intellectual property in ways that make it meaningful to us. In regards to the comics-based childhood artistic activities described by participants in this project, they engaged in a vernacular artistic practice rooted in mass media form and content that embraces, personalizes, reflects back upon and, ultimately reframes it as their own.
Speaking of the Non-Fiction Comics Festival, if you’d like to hear audio selections from our interviews with Andrew, John, Rick and Steve join us Friday, November 17 at 4:30pm at the Archives Arcade Bar in Burlington for Hey Kids, Comics! Vermont Comic Book Cultures, a Listening Party.
Non-Fiction Comics Festival is sponsored by Vermont Humanities, Champion Comics and Coffee, the Center for Cartoon Studies, Seven Days, Children’s Literacy Foundation, University of Vermont School of the Arts and the Archives Arcade Bar.
