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cumbersome, obstructive, an imposing duty, a deferral of pleasure—in order to
get at what every laborious framework seemed to conceal within itself, the story
that had already arrived at the place [the reader] wanted to be” (123).
The kids who collected the books, who organized and re-organized
them according to creation date, principle artist or writer, or by genre (superhero
yam, romance, western, and so on), who belonged to fan clubs, who wrote long
letters speculating on areas and ideas the comics themselves never touched, and
who created a universe, gave their heroes a reality that displaced the reality of
their own lives. Most of these fans lived in obscurity; others were drawn to the
source of their fixation and became artists and writers themselves. Much as a
young boy might have grown up wishing to play baseball in Yankee Stadium,
these young men (and women) wanted to work in the same buildings, walk the
same halls as their forefathers: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Steve Dikto,
and others who created the strips and the comics and the art they loved. Other
fans found other routes.
Sean Howe argues that modem writers have brought comics into
“literary circles" and claims that hidden in much modem literature is the “once
furtive formative obsessions." that many writers had had with the comic books
of their youth (xi).3 Besides Lethems’s The Fortress o f Solitude—which, Howe
argues, contains “passages [that] miraculously telegraph the very experience of
reading a comic"—he also cites Rick Moody's The Ice Storm (where
“protagonist Paul Hood uses an old issue of Fantastic Four as a metaphor for
domestic breakdown") and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures o f
Kavalier & Clay (which “lovingly chronicles two comic book creators'’) as
obvious examples of writers who have merged comics and modem literature
(XI).4 In each of these novels, Howe argues, comic book knowledge and comic
book culture is “filtered through the guise of fiction" (xi). For the reader, the
reverberations of comic books within the prose narrative creates a reflective
moment, a moment imbued with a sensation of nostalgia—or, at least, a sense of
being in on the joke.5
In these novels the comic book hero or story or tale is not the center of
the work; rather, they are peripheral to the story.6 The very idea of the comic
book—the universe created in it, its heroes and villains—and those doing the
creating become fused with the story. Perhaps as metaphor, perhaps as symbol,
perhaps as representative of some other space of meaning; comic book culture is
appropriated by literature to serve some other purpose besides being the
narrat ive. Think about it, even Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures o f Kavalier &
Clay> has less to do with the fantasy narrative of “The Escapist”—Kavalier &
Clay’s comic book creation—than it does with the narrative centered on literary
realism of two creative young men coming of age at a particular time and in
particular place.7 Chris Ware argues for the primacy of comic books suggesting
that “the possible vocabulary of comics is, by definition, unlimited, [because of]
the tactility of an experience told in pictures,” and that “comics are an art of pure