Comics and the Code

Happiness is a stack of comic books.

— Charles M. Schultz

A mint-condition copy of Action Comics #1—the comic-book premiere of Superman—sold for $3.3 million this week, according to Antiques & the Arts Weekly.

Before this week's sale, the 1938 book had changed hands three times, selling for $1.5 million in 2010, $1.8 million in 2017, and $2.1 million in 2018.

The comic survived in pristine shape because it had been tucked inside a film-fan magazine for five decades. A collector bought the magazine at an auction in 1980, unaware of the hidden gem inside.

"This book launched the superhero genre," auctioneer Vincent Zurzolo told Antiques & the Arts Weekly. "There’s a reason collectors and fans will always be obsessed with it."

If you missed this week's auction, or can't spare $3.3 million for a comic book, I suggest you at least spend $16 and buy a copy of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

That extraordinary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—inspired by the story of Superman’s creators—recounts the big-city adventures of two young oddballs who arrive in New York on the eve of World War II, hoping to cash in on the latest American craze: the superhero. You'll learn more about the origins of comic-book publishing than you'd care to know, but will find Chabon's tale spellbinding.

While I never had $3, much less $3 million, to spend as a kid, I remember buying comic books religiously. They cost only 12 cents and—given the gripping stories and lavish, cover-to-cover illustrations—were well worth the price. Find eight empty soda-pop bottles, redeem them for the three-cent deposits, and you could go home with two!

Always a festive day, a new batch of titles would show up every other Tuesday at the neighborhood confectionery. My friends and I would rush to the store after school, to make sure we didn't miss out on our favorites. 

Mine were without doubt The Fantastic Four; Detective Comics (featuring that ethereal night-creature Batman); Strange Tales (featuring Dr. Strange); Tales to Astonish (featuring Ant-Man and The Incredible Hulk); Classics Illustrated (retellings of great books like Kidnapped, Mysterious Island and The War of the Worlds); Our Army at War (featuring the broody, brawny Sgt. Rock); and the always rip-snorting Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandoes.

Happiness indeed was a stack of comic books. Little did I know the comics I loved were unloved by millions of parents.

Parental displeasure stemmed in large part due to Seduction of the Innocent, a 1954 best-seller by a crusading disciple of Freud, Dr. Fredric Wertham.

Dr. Wertham's book convinced parents that comics—packed as they were with vivid depictions of nonconformity—turned decent, all-American kids into rebels and juvenile delinquents. 

Dr. Wertham's call for federal oversight of the comic-book industry gave rise to Congressional hearings and to the Comics Code Authority, an effort by publishers to censor themselves.

The authority was superheroes' Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. 

Publishers would submit their comic books to the authority and, if approved, include its seal on the covers. The seal on the cover proved to distributors, retailers, parents and readers that the a comic book had met the authority's ironfisted code.

Among other things, the code prohibited comics from presenting cops, judges, lawyers and government officials "in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority."

It also required that "in every instance, good shall triumph over evil;" that "if crime is depicted, it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity;" and that, if the cartoons illustrated violence, none were "lurid, unsavory, or gruesome." 

Depictions of "nudity in any form" and of "sex perversion, abnormalities, and illicit sex relations" were all strictly taboo. So were depictions of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, cannibals, zombies, and women's cleavage.

The Comics Code Authority remained the industry's arbiter until 2001, when the censors made the mistake of rejecting an issue of Marvel Comics' X-Force. After the rejection, Marvel quit submitting comics for approval, and other publishers soon followed suit.

Despite efforts to police itself through the Comics Code Authority, the mid-century comic-book industry was too inherently anarchic to save the children. 

In 2003, cultural critic Edward Said wrote, “I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result. Everything about the enticing book of colored pictures, but especially its untidy, sprawling format, the colorful riotous extravagance of its pictures, the unrestrained passage between what the characters thought and said, the exotic creatures and adventures reported and depicted: all this made up for a hugely wonderful thrill, entirely unlike anything I had hitherto known or experienced."    

No Vaccine for Vanity

Vanity costs money and is a long way leading nowhere.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Planners of scientific and medical meetings are captivated by yet another band-aid fix for flagging attendance: vaccine passports.

Vaccine passports will bring back the crowds, they insist.

But one such planner, Ben Hainsworth, has called vaccine passports a "red herring." Planners should instead be focused on their value proposition. 

“If we have vaccine passports, but we are still thinking about events in the same way we did in 2019, the recovery will be a big flop," Hainsworth says. "We need to think about the unique value of face-to-face and start re-pitching and redesigning our meetings."

It's no surprise scientific and medical meeting planners love vaccine passports. For daydreamers like them, vaccine passports are the panacea of the month. Naysayers like Hainsworth are simply that—naysayers.

But is he? I think not. When you consider their elements, today's scientific and medical meetings offer attendees little of real value: they draw no leading practitioners, provide no unpublished research, and appeal to practically no one but job-hunters. Why would they recover after the pandemic?

I saw these gatherings lose their value long ago, while working for scientific and medical meeting planners back in the '90s. 

A smug bunch, the planners I worked for clung vainly to the status quo, repeating tired formulas and delegating the crucial work of program-design to volunteers. Content to live in the "fairyland" of federally subsidized science and medicine, they denied that meeting attendance was declining—geometrically—and that my research was showing first-world practitioners found their events irrelevant.

Two real-world movements drove the decline and irrelevancy: open science and managed care. But these vain planners would have none of it. They bristled when presented with the fact that their events were subsisting on job-hunters, grad students, and a few third-world practitioners, while pointing with pride to their swelling exhibit halls, a boon to hospitals in search of equipment. But there were hidden economic pressures on equipment-makers, too, thanks both to managed care and the inherently unaccountable nature of tradeshow exhibiting.

Flash forward to 2021 and the chickens have come home to roost. The pandemic has already up-ended meeting planners' reality and experts are predicting that by 2025 the world will be a world of "tele-everything." Practitioners, yearning for safety and convenience, will work from their homes and private offices, travel less frequently, and make few forays into public spaces. Live scientific and medical meetings may be nothing more than a pale memory.

Too bad there's no vaccine for vanity.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Warwick Davies, principal of The Event Mechanic! for alerting me to Ben Hainsworth's remarks.

Many Mickles Make a Muckle

Nothing in nature is more true—
"many mickles make a muckle."

— George Washington

In a post last May—when the lockdown was novel—I asked: What possible good can come from Covid-19?

My answer asserted that the virus was an "ugly duckling" from which would emerge a new normal "prettier than we ever imagined." As proof, I predicted:

• The environment would refresh itself
• The planet's animals would reassert themselves
• Parents would rediscover their children—and vice versa
• Neighbors would reach out to neighbors
• People would rediscover art, architecture, books, and bikes
• Family members would sleep longer and eat better
• Citizens would recognize government wasn't the enemy

Since my post in May, an additional 470 thousand Americans have died of Covid-19; and 8 million have become poor. 

But are the rest of us in a better spot? Is the new normal prettier than imagined?

Yes, I believe it is, and in a major way; because things—little things—add up.

Many mickles make a muckle.

Muckle comes from mickle, Old English for a "big deal." 

In Beowulf's time, Brits would say Grendel was a mickle; call the Justinian Plague  a mickle; or name a big village Mickle-something, as we would call New York "The Big Apple" or New Orleans "The Big Easy."

The thriftier Brits even had a proverb: "Many a pickle makes a mickle," by which they meant, "expenses add up quickly." 

The Scots, speaking of thrift, pronounced mickle as muckle. We get our word much from muckle.

George Washington, prone to mangling English, in a 1793 letter to his manager at Mount Vernon coined the proverb "Many mickles make a muckle."

The thrift-minded Washington, intending to scold the man for piling up expenses during his time away from the plantation, meant to write "Many a pickle makes a mickle," but instead wrote "Many mickles make a muckle," failing to remember the two words are synonyms, not antonyms.

Washington's confusion aside, things do add up, even little things. Especially when you're in a pickle, as we are today.

But things aren't all bad. Covid-19 has in fact ushered changes long overdue:

• Virology and telemedicine have blossomed
• E-commerce and white-collar productivity are booming
• Science and distance learning are no longer gated
• The skies and waterways are healing themselves
• And—an unmitigated blessing—Donald Trump is history

Many a pickle makes a mickle.

Pickle by the way denotes a "wee bit." A 17th century Scottish word, pickle referred to the grain on the top of a barley stalk.

Scotsmen also pronounced pickle as puckle, a word they still use to mean "bit."

Where we'd say "I want a bit of ketchup with my fries," a Scotsman might say "I want a puckle of ketchup with my fries."

Thoughts and Prayers

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.

— Ernest Hemingway

Boulder, Atlanta, Springfield, Midland, Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, Virginia Beach, Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh, Annapolis.

Alongside these place names, the abstract words thoughts and prayers are indeed obscene (obscene, adjective, from the Latin ob ("in front of") + caenum ("filth")).

We're embarrassed to hear them any longer. As we should be.

Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice. We had heard them and had read them now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages."

Let's retire thoughts and prayers. Permanently. 

We have heard them now for a long time and can no longer stand to hear them. 

They're words that have become obscene.

Voter Suppression Has My Vote

Let the rabble amuse itself by voting.

― Aldous Huxley

Right-wing columnist Kevin Williamson grabbed headlines this week by recommending "categorical" voter suppression.

"The republic would be better served by having fewer—but better—voters," he wrote.

We believe it's a mainstay, but voting is at best a "sedative," Williamson argues.

"It soothes people with the illusion that they have more control over their lives and their public affairs than they actually do," he writes.

Denying the vote to progressives and populists would get us out of the mess we're in, Williams argues. He would begin reform by raising the voting age to 30.

I'm all for categorical voter disenfranchisement, too. In fact, with Socrates, I long for a republic in which "guardians"—not mudsills—appoint philosophers to rule the state.

So to whom would I deny voting rights? Here's my Top 10 list:

1. Inattentive parents
2. Conspiracy theorists
3. Overachievers
4. Wyoming residents
5. People who reflexively "reply all"
6. Brand ambassadors
7. Ayn Rand fans
8. Incompetent Zoom users
9. Road hogs
10. Suze Orman

How about you? 

Does voter suppression have your vote?