A hallmark of the home that I grew up in was the Edmonton Journal. And to me the best part of the Edmonton Journal was the Sunday color comic pages.
The only “stories” I can recollect my mother reading aloud to me were those short vignettes in the funny papers. Every Sunday, it was our ritual: mom and I would lie side by side on her bed and she would read the comics to me. Even when I learned how to read for myself, I insisted that she keep doing this except then we would take turns voicing the different characters. Like a backwards bedtime story, when she was done, Mom went to sleep. It was the only nap that she let herself take all week.
And so, my reading career began with the comics. Short, sweet (well, not always), clever, enigmatic – and with pictures! – the Sunday comics were my high literature at the time. They paved the way for a love of comics that remains true, even though I don’t read many now. Peanuts, Hi & Lois, Blondie, B. C., The Wizard of Id, Tumbleweeds, Beetle Bailey, Funky Winkerbean and Hager the Horrible were the friends that populated my early years, along with Cookie Monster, Mr. Dressup and the Friendly Giant.
Perhaps comics just fit my style, my reading style. I like finishing things: the last cracker in the box, the last of the shampoo in the bottle, the end of a pot of coffee. Finishing things clears room for what’s new. Which is another thing I like. Starting things. Comics are short, started and finished in one sitting.
Much of my reading is like that. Not that I have to finish a book in one sitting, but I like to clearly see the gratification of the end. But because I think it’s healthy to challenge my own preferred parameters, I recently slogged my way through Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, basically skim-reading the last 300 pages. At 950-pages plus, it is a Moby Dick of a book. And all I can think is that I could have read three normal-sized books instead. “Finished three” is better in my economy than “finished one”, even if by page count it’s the same thing. Three stories will always trump one. Ask any self-respecting toddler who begs for “just one more story” to put off the dreaded task of going to sleep.
I worry, sometimes, that this is a failure of mine, that I lack intellectual fortitude. I don’t like tackling the long and hard books. Most Pulitzer or Booker prize winners either baffle me or bore me to tears. I prefer Newbery winners, books written for middle-grade kids and “YA” – young adults, and even Caldecott winners, the best and the brightest of the picture books.
But make no mistake: just because these books are written “for children” doesn’t make their creators any less talented or intelligent than those “other” book winners. Hanging out in the children’s book world on the interweb has confirmed that the authors and illustrators of children’s books are masters in distillation of words and expression of images, and every bit as prolific.
Is it about “smart-ness” – that I don’t like much literary fiction or books written in an Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close manner? It hurts my head just to try and figure out some of those books. Yes, it’s art, and yes, there’s room for All The Art. But there’s also room for All The Readers.
I don’t think that my early love affair with comics set me up for this. Rather, I think I was lucky to be introduced at a young age into the genres of literature that I love. Comics, picture books, kids lit: there’s just as many of those on my Read and To-Be-Read lists as good adult books I have loved.
Well, maybe a little more. Maybe I’m just not that “smart”. Or maybe I’m just not that “old”.
