Winding your way down Yancy Street

I’ve never been to New York in the summer. And in particular I’ve never been to the Lower East Side in summer in the early 20th century. Yet I know the place like home. I can smell the fruit and cabbages that have rolled from barrows to get trodden underfoot. The stink of livestock and automobiles. The tobacco and stale sweat on the clothes of passers-by. The cheerfully rude street banter. The delighted shouts of kids running wild. The hissing gush of fire hydrants and the petrichor rising from the heat-stifled dust of the sidewalk.

How did that become a familiar place in my childhood memory? Not from movies like Dead End (1937), much as I love them. They can show you a photographic record, but they can never depict the way it felt. For that you need a guide like Jack Kirby.

A time machine could drop you in Lower Manhattan, but it couldn’t find you Yancy Street, though you’d recognize the hard-as-nails stare of Yancy Streeters in the neighbourhood kids – among them, back then, the young Jacob Kurtzberg. Wikipedia credits the invention of Yancy Street to Jack and Stan Lee, but if any such claim stretched credibility it’s that one. Stan grew up ninety blocks away in the Upper West Side. If he ever saw a street gang it would most likely have been up on the movie screen. He never lived that life and breathed that air as Jack did.

There’s been a lot of water under the Williamsburg Bridge since the Silver Age. Revisionists got their hands on the FF and soft-soaped everything for a more sentimental generation. So Ben Grimm became a former Yancy Streeter, Aunt Petunia a young medic, the gang itself openly reconciled with the hero they loved to hate – or hated to love. I’ll have none of it, and I don’t believe Jack would either. He could be big-hearted without getting schmaltzy. He could depict affection without corniness. He was a no-nonsense, stogie-chomping guy, just like his big orange creation, and his comic book New York was real in a way that nothing in Marvel’s universe feels these days.

And that’s why it matters. Because when we see the Surfer soaring over the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we also know the bustle of the ordinary folk way down there on the street. Jack shows us that so as to make the cosmic adventures real. When Galactus arrives, he doesn’t just come to chow down on concrete and girders. There are living, breathing people at threat, and the genius of Jack Kirby is to make them a richly contrary variety of types – not the nice, carefully set-up-for-sympathy cast of relatable bystanders that a modern comics writer would assemble, but real New Yorkers, warts ‘n all, many of whom might resent the high-handed experts like Reed Richards, the liberated women like Sue Storm, the loudmouth kids like her brother, and even be jealous of a rocky-skinned, two-fisted clobberin’ monster like Ben Grimm.

The people who inhabit Jack Kirby’s New York – a place he evoked more expressively than any other comics artist, even Ditko – reflect the ambiguity the Fantastic Four themselves feel about their role as heroes. His New Yorkers are maddening, loud, ungrateful, fickle, adoring, demanding, vibrant, scrappy and fun. When the FF step forward to protect mankind, they stand as champions of the good, the bad, and the majority who are just in between.

In such a mix, the Yancy Street gang stand out as the most constant of the lot. Whenever the Thing’s self-pity inflates to grandly indulgent proportions, he can count on a snappy put-down from the Yancy Streeters to bring him back to Earth. He might go into space, fight alien empires and demi-gods, and save the whole furshlugginer galaxy, but when he’s back and takes a stroll past Yancy Street, it’s their jeers and catcalls that comprise the most sincere welcome home. It’s fitting that, with Ben Grimm’s self-loathing simmering just under the surface, the nearest he’d have to a fan club would be a bunch of hard-boiled, blue-collar guys who send him exploding cigars and pelt him with rotten tomatoes. And you get the feeling he wouldn’t have it any other way.

* * *

This essay originally appeared in Jack Kirby: Variations On A Theme, edited by Glenn B Fleming, who knew Jack Kirby personally. You need the whole book, true believer.

How to deal with trigger warnings without wrecking fiction

When I was a kid, the comic books I bought were published under the Comics Code Authority. That came about as a result of the Wertham horror comics scare of the 1950s. If you saw a book with the Code seal on it, you could be sure it wouldn't have swearing or excessive violence, or deal with sensitive issues like drug use.

Famously, Spider-Man went out for three issues without the CCA seal when Stan Lee insisted on running a story that featured drug addiction. I remember wondering what this meant. At any rate, the sky didn't fall in.

The Comics Code was designed to control the kinds of story kids were reading. Nowadays some grown-ups are concerned about encountering stories that will upset them. And so we hear about trigger warnings and content notes, the point of which are to warn the reader: "This novel may emotionally upset you with scenes of x, y or z."

The problem with a trigger warning is that pretty much all good stories are going to shake you up, the best ones quite radically and not at all gently, and being told the way they're going to do that is guaranteed to ruin the story. So how do we ensure that sensitive readers can steer clear of anything that might upset them while the rest of us dive into the unpredictable currents of hopefully disturbing literature?

How about a Novels Code Authority? In effect, in place of putting a trigger warning on any book that could upset some readers, mark the books that include no such content. Any novel published under the Novels Code would be certified free of emotional triggers, just like those Code-approved comics in the '50s and '60s. So anybody can safely read a book with the NCA seal on the cover. If it doesn't have the seal, that tells you it might contain triggers and you've got the option not to read it.

Why we need comics we can care about

Tom Brevoort, who is Marvel’s Senior VP of Publishing, recently spoke about the fundamental difference between the DC universe and the Marvel universe. As he sees it, the former takes an optimistic view of the world, the latter a pessimistic one. “Even something like Dark Knight Returns, which is gritty as hell, is at its heart about a heroic ideal, a larger-than-life figure who rises up to champion the city in its time of need.”

I’m not sure about this assertion – though, to be fair to Mr Brevoort, he’s a very smart guy and he did open with the caveat that it was too big a subject to talk about in one short post. As a kid, I turned to Marvel, not for pessimism, but for a more believable idea of what a hero was. I could see that Peter Parker’s heroism cost him more than Clark Kent’s ever did. He was a bigger hero. I didn’t need Aunt May to die to prove that, I just needed to believe that Peter was afraid she would.

In the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, Marvel stood out because the stories took a deeper, more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. The regular guy behind the mask had problems like the rest of us. Courage had a cost. The Marvel universe was a dramatic canvas of love, secrets, misunderstandings, shame, emotional dilemmas. I’m not sure I’d call that universe pessimistic, just indifferent to human affairs. Marvel heroes didn’t get any helping hands from the storytellers.

Are today’s comics (and I’m not specifically thinking of Marvel) rooted in pessimism? Maybe. I don’t really follow superhero comics much, but I see that where once the most extreme stakes for the heroes were life and death, now they’re more often things like disfigurement and brain damage. Action has often been replaced with brutality, personal problems with politics, characterization with a stance on thinly disguised current issues.

Dilemmas in many of today’s comic books are no longer emotional but intellectual. Mutants, that’s like racism, right? And superhero registration, that’s the war on terror. Yeah, we all get it. My blank look is boredom, not confusion.

As I said, I’m not talking about just Marvel here. Comics are a shrinking market and yet the superheroes of the Silver Age are entertaining bigger audiences than ever before. The movies are watched by seventy million people while the comic books’ readership has dwindled to a diehard band of collectors and fanboys. Why is that?

Bambos Georgiou talks on his blog about some of the things that may have gone wrong with the comics market. You would think, after all, that comics as a medium should appeal to both book readers and moviegoers. That’s a pretty wide demographic. The problem is not in the medium but in the content. And we need to qualify that by adding that it’s specifically the US and UK that is facing this problem.

It isn’t a question of whether today’s comics are darker – look how dark Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are. Comics are strangling themselves to death because most people don’t care a jot about the impersonal and somewhat abstract themes in these stories. Fanboys love that stuff but, thing is, fanboys are not really typical. And in a desperate attempt to inject the missing emotion, writers too often turn to sadism and plot complexity, delivering story punchlines that, if they arouse any emotion, deliver disgust and dismay rather than thrills.

Remember, I'm not saying all comic books are doing this. We still have some great ones that are about the people at the heart of the story. But overall it's a trend that has bedevilled the creators who grew up in the long shadow of Moore and Miller, who ape their style without getting even a hint of their substance. It's like a tyro novelist trying to be Hemingway without earning it. And it's a trend that's putting off new readers.

The majority of us connect with stories about characters whose concerns are personal, immediate, emotional, simple and relatable. Explore themes, sure – but personalize them. Blade Runner is not an issue-based examination of human identity; Roy Batty wants more life, fucker. And he ups and shows us what it is to be human.

I was in France recently. There you’ll see kids, teens and adults reading comics. The genres are as broad as in cinema or TV drama. The stories are gripping, and wildly popular like Harry Potter books or Sherlock Holmes movies. A ten-year-old picked up the first Mirabilis book. I thought it might be too old for her, but she read it through twice (the second time on her eleventh birthday, actually) and then demanded more. Teens and adults can enjoy that same story, perhaps seeing a little more in it than younger readers but without demanding characters’ eyes to be plucked out to make it “mature”.

I’ll give you a good analogy that shows how comic books could turn themselves around. A few years before J J Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, one of the show’s TV producers was talking about how maybe the ST franchise was just dying. And indeed it was dying – of worthiness, of sterility. Dying because it had made its issues bigger than its characters. To paraphrase The Onion, it was dying because of the heavy-handed messages about tolerance and the scenes set at long tables in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail.

The reboot made Star Trek once more about characters on a journey. We were with people we cared about as they faced huge challenges, They had to reach inside and discover the part of themselves that could meet such challenges. We saw them grow and change.

You tell a story like that, in any medium you like, and they will come.

Death and the maiden over

Death, along with Jack Frost and the Moon and other entities of nature, in folktales appears in person - not the divine ruler of the realm of death, as in mythological stories, but the very embodied spirit of mortality. In Norwegian tales it's often a specific death, a given plague that is seen as an old woman going from village to village. Sometimes Death can be tricked - though usually not for long, and at great cost, for if folktales don't ultimately tell the starkest of truths then what are those stories for?

Italo Calvino was partial to Italian folktales, and the last story in his collection Fiabe Italiane is "Jump into my Sack", in which a crippled boy acquires a magic sack in which he briefly traps Death. There's no comeback, and he releases Death almost at once without prompting - just the sort of rough edge you expect in folktales.

Arthur Ransome's story "The Soldier and Death" is structurally much tidier. There the sack belongs to a Russian soldier who uses it to snare Death when she comes for the Tzar:

From that time on there was no dying in the world . There were births every day, and plenty of them, but nobody died. It was a poor time for doctors. And so it was for many years. Death had come to an end, and it was as if all men would live for ever. And all the time the little old woman, Death, tied up in a sack, unable to get about her business, was hanging from the top of a tall poplar tree away in the forest.

In time the soldier realizes the consequences of a world in which no-one dies, so he sets Death free. But she's thoroughly frightened and won't take him now, so he goes on to harrow Hell and finally meet a fate that is affecting, but far too authorial and elegant for me to believe that Ransome has presented this story just as he came across it in some woodland hut beside the samovar.

"The Soldier and Death" was published in 1920. Nineteen years later, the story put on new clothes in the form of On Borrowed Time, a movie with Lionel Barrymore as an old man who traps Death, now male, up an apple tree. He finally relents when his grandson falls trying to climb the tree and is paralyzed but unable to die. This version ends with Gramps and young Pud (sic) following Death up to a shining light in the sky. What can I say? Paul Osborn, the screenwriter, was perhaps not quite the storytelling genius Ransome was.

Early in 1962, in the pages of Amazing (Adult) Fantasy #9, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko revived the story as "The Man Who Captured Death" - a classic Lee/Ditko title, for sure. Death here looks like Bengt Ekerot and is caught in "an electronic ray". Beetles become immune to DDT and eat the crops; rats breed and infest the cities; antibiotics stop working; the incurably ill suffer but cannot die. So the old scientist who designed the ray turns it off: "You were right, grim one! No man may alter the mysterious scheme of things!" To which Death replies, "Thus has it ever been... Thus must it ever be..." Okay, still not on a par with Ransome. But it has Ditko drawing Death, and if anything could equal the dark brilliance of Russian folklore it's that.

Whether Death is stuck in a sack or a beam of light, good stories never die, especially when deadlines loom. And so we have a new spin on the story for television in the form of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I'm doubting that Death will actually be personified in this show, as that kind of concept belongs to fairytales and not to science fiction, but it will be interesting to see how the writers develop it. Because if Death is not a person, or at least a fantastic force of nature, then what process could systematically stop everyone dying throughout the world? In ten weeks we'll know.

In Mirabilis we have our own take on the story, "Death and the Maiden Over", in which Death arrives at Lord’s for the end of the cricket season. In a curious wager, he pads up and faces each of England’s fast bowlers. Until somebody can get him out, no-one in the world is to die. Finally, after a long afternoon that sees hospital wards filling up to capacity, W G Grace is called out of retirement and gets Death leg before wicket from his bath chair. Appropriate for a doctor, I think.

Storytelling with pictures

Still on writing tips today, but this time specifically how to tell a story with just pictures. The starting point, surprise surprise, is no different from prose: you need to make an emotional connection with the reader. In novels we have voice as the primary and most powerful tool for this. British publisher David Fickling, creator of The DFC in which Mirabilis first appeared as well as the upcoming Phoenix comic, talks about a warmth that is to be found, in various guises, in the voice of all great kids' writers.

Not just kids' writers, in fact. Even when a writer like Graham Greene tells a story of corruption and genocide, or Nabokov invites us to share the viewpoint of a paedophile, what comes across in the narrative voice above all is humanity. Contrast that with supermarket crime novels, where brutal events are described with no trace of human feeling, like a sales rep describing the Holocaust. If the emotional connection between writer and reader is missing, the novel loses its grip. It becomes a mere Powerpoint presentation of plot. The author's voice is what encourages us to strip off the armour of disbelief, expose ourselves to the dangers of the journey, and come away changed by the experience.

In movies, the writer doesn't have that option. You can have tone (often emphasized by a narrator's voiceover) which quickly serves to assure us that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, say, is not going to be The Salton Sea. Compare the original Blade Runner with the Director's Cut; simply by removing Deckard's voiceover, the tone is altered completely. But tone in a movie is not the same as voice in prose, and in the gap between the two you'll find the reason why movies must have their heroes saving cats and taking care to hit all the beats of the monomyth.

Comics, of course, are not a purely visual medium. The writer is typically more present in the finished work than any director in his movie. Look at Sandman or Swamp Thing. Those are literary works that strongly give the sense that Gaiman and Moore are storytellers speaking directly into our ear. Still more so in the Marvel comics of the Silver Age, where Stan Lee's voice ushered his readers through stories like the patter of a circus ringmaster.

That's not the only way to tell a story in comics, of course. I use no captions in Mirabilis except for Jack's inner thoughts, and those sparingly. I almost never use thought bubbles (unless projected by telepathic brains in jars) because I want the reader to come to these characters as in life or in a long-running TV show: befriending them over time. Still, the author's touch is not and should never be invisible; Hitchcock observes murders in a very different way from Carol Reed. Compare the first ten minutes of The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich. Both were scripted by Launder & Gilliat, both feature Charters and Caldicott as key supporting characters, yet only the former has the warmth that David Fickling spoke of.

Stories are made up of scenes, and the same rules apply at every level. So let's look at an example of how to establish emotional connection using a series of images. This is cinema in its purest form: a sequence of uninflected images that acquire meaning through juxtaposition. And ironically, that pure visual storytelling is best seen these days in commercials. They're selling a product, sure, but they still need to make that direct emotional circuit into the audience's brains. It's all about story.

Take a look at the Virgin Atlantic commercial above. This has a group of Virgin's female cabin crew walking through the terminal attracting gawping looks from men. We see a guy dripping hot dog sauce on his shirt; another forgets all about his videogame. But notice that the commercial doesn’t open on a shot of the stewardesses. Instead, we see a man arriving at the airport. He gets out of the taxi talking on a mobile phone. He looks up, gradually loses interest in the call. The phone slips from his fingers. He sees something that's grabbed his attention, but what? Cut to a reverse shot, past his legs, as the phone breaks on the floor and we get glimpses of the stewardesses walking into shot – and only after that do we get a clear view of them walking towards us, a riot of colour and glamour amid the drab greys of the 1980s.

The commercial is constructed to use both suspense ("What is the man reacting to?") and empathy/identification ("See him? That's how you are meant to feel."). Starting on the stewardesses themselves would give us something to react to, but no viewpoint character to bring us within the story. Of course, we only specifically identify with the man on the phone for a few seconds, then we’re on to a series of loose identifications that gradually diffuse our point of view into the crowd. But in order to place us there as an onlooker in the crowd, the commercial starts off with a perfect little mini-story, complete with lead character, in order to corral our emotional response.

I feel I almost ought to apologize for using a commercial with such an egregious instance of the Male Gaze. There is undeniably a tone in this work, and it is nearer to the sales rep than to Graham Greene. But we can assume that it's male airline passengers whom the ad agency were targeting (apart from the little girl who sadly aspires only to be a honey in a tight red skirt) and, as an example of the visual storytelling craft, this shows perfect construction. But me, I still prefer Air Canada.

Disney buys stake in POW Entertainment

I was looking for an excuse to knock up a few more Marvel-esque comic covers, and Stan Lee's recent deal with Disney is just that. Seeing as how the worthwhile Marvel movies have been the ones that stuck closest to Stan's original concepts and characters (I mean Spider-man 2 and Iron Man) the news gives real hope for Disney to do some interesting things with the Marvel universe. So this cover is fondly dedicated to Stan the Man himself, for turning a whole bunch of generations onto the wonders of great storytelling.

Jubilations!

Happy holidays. We're signing off till the New Year but, if you aren't too stuffed with turkey, pop by tomorrow as I may put up a little seasonal treat.

This Christmas Eve comic cover is dedicated to our mums - mine and Leo's and Martin's, all absolute treasures. And, as it happens, my mum has a connection to Mirabilis because the nickname she had as a young girl is also Lord Deerdand's nickname for Estelle. I can put it no better than to paraphrase Dr Johnson, who wrote to his own mum: "You are the best mother and, I believe, the best woman in the world." And to paraphrase Stan the Man: 'nuff said!

Too cool for schoolkids?

The next X-Men movie is reportedly going right back to the original Lee & Kirby Silver Age stories in which Professor Charles Xavier first sets up his School for Gifted Youngsters.

Not before time. If they’d done that to begin with, instead of the down-n-dirty, angst-ridden trilogy about what a tortured life Wolverine has had, then they would have scored roughly twice as much at box office. How do I know? Simple: Raimi and Favreau showed everyone how to do it with their Marvel movies.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, comic books shifted from being simple, relatable stories for a broad (and mostly young) market to brooding fare for the college-age crowd. To anyone younger than 13 or older than 30, Wolverine looks like the kind of surly git who mutters to himself while hogging the pool table. But to that specific demographic – or rather, to the very narrow slice of them that buys comics – he’s all about how, like, hard it is, y’know?

For those who don’t read comics, these movies shape perception of the medium. So The Times will go on at great length about something like Rex Mundi - as if that niche of avid fans represented anything at all. Now, I’m not dissing the quality of Arvid Nelson’s work. Quite the contrary. I’m just saying that media interest in something like Rex Mundi is about as relevant as who won the Booker prize. Let me assure you: I grokked that Dark Phoenix cycle of stories by Claremont and Byrne that the X-Men movies were based on. Man, it was life-changing. But I was a 19-year-old role-playing, SF-reading, physics undergraduate Lene Lovich fan at the time – so hardly representative of the mass market.

Because of the media’s take on comics, it’s hard for people who don’t read them to separate the medium from the content. That’s why book publishers mostly just don’t get it. If you say “Harry Potter” or “Spiderwick”, that they understand. It’s a book, it can be a movie, a videogame… It can be enjoyed by adults and kids alike, in big numbers. But when you talk to them about graphic novels, they don’t connect it with that kind of crossover high concept stuff that pays for all their other fiction. Best case, they start to think in terms of Fun Home or Persepolis. Challenging masterworks that are brooding, brilliant - and bloody unlikely to hook a broad readership.

Maybe movies could give a useful steer here. The average PG film is ten times as profitable as the average R-rated film. Really, it is. Now go find a producer in the UK who isn’t trying to get a horror flick made. And the banker never wears a mac in the pouring rain…

This kind of thinking, in an industry as chronically panic-stricken as book publishing, becomes self-perpetuating. A publisher releases a hip, dark, ultra-violent graphic novel that appeals to teen male sci-fi geeks. Or it might be a downbeat, leisurely, surreal exploration of angst-ridden daily life aimed at thirtysomethings. Razordeath: Alien Infarction or All the Ways My Life Hurts (okay, I made those up). Either way, the book sells 15,000 copies and the publisher concludes that’s the limit of the market. Oh sure - and prior to J K Rowling it was a truth universally acknowledged that children’s fantasy never made it as far as the bestseller lists.

I love the works of Adrian Tomine, Daniel Clowes, Alison Bechdel - and I even like the two-fisted horror/action stuff, as long as it’s all driven from character the way guys like Arcudi and Brubaker write it. But I wouldn’t be enjoying comics today if I hadn’t had Stan Lee and Roy Thomas to open that magic door for me. They did it with simple, powerful stories about universally relatable characters, exactly as Pixar was to do 30 years later. And that’s the kind of readership, 9-12 years plus family, that book publishers ought to be looking at if they want to see the kind of business that graphic novels could really do.

Something fantastig (sic)

My friend Michael Levy was at a cocktail party this weekend. His host: none other than Stan Lee. (There they are below.)

I’ve never been given to hero-worship as such, but Stan Lee was a big figure for me growing up. He’s J K Rowling, Anthony Horowitz and Stephenie Meyer rolled into one. I doubt if any other writer in history has created so many characters who inspire such levels of absolute devotion.

In the rush to make movies based on comic books, many Hollywood execs have missed the point that the really big hits have all come from the mind of Stan Lee. The Spider-man movies, for example; even if we forget the third one (and believe me, I’ve tried) that’s nearly $2 billion in box office takings alone.

Not that the money means a thing, but look at the love. Aunt May, Pepper Potts, Foggy Nelson, Mary Jane Watson - Stan created families of characters we can connect to and care about. Now, tell me: does anybody even remember the name of the lead character in Wanted?

Stan matters to me because his work taught me that stories in print form could be as compelling as movies. And, month on month, he showed me how to do it. The power of suspense to draw you in. The effectiveness of surprises and reversals to keep you guessing. The impact of cliffhangers to bring you back. And, most important of all, the through-line of characters that makes us want to invest in them emotionally.

There’s only one other cocktail party in the world that I’d want to crash as much, and that would be one hosted by Stan Lee’s one-time creative partner, Steve Ditko. (This is completely hypothetical, as I’m pretty sure Ditko isn't the type to throw cocktail parties.) The Spider-man stories were created by them both, following the “Marvel Method” whereby artist and writer would agree on a plot, the artist would go off and pencil the comic, and the writer (almost always Stan in the early days) would only then add the dialogue.
Famously (though not necessarily accurately, as Jonathan Ross has pointed out )the two are said to have fallen out over the identity of the Green Goblin. This had been set up over many issues and had all the readers guessing, including an earnest little wonk in short pants called David Morris. After forty years, I don’t think I’m throwing out a spoiler if I say that the Goblin turned out to be Norman Osborn, father of Peter Parker’s best pal Harry. Ditko had supposedly wanted him to turn out to be someone we had never seen before, on the grounds that was more realistic.

So it was. But stories aren’t realistic, and Stan was right. For whatever reason, Ditko left the comic before the Goblin was unmasked. He was replaced by John Romita (that’s J.R. senior, kiddies) - a towering talent in his own right, so it wasn’t exactly a George Lazenby moment. But I hope that there’s an Amazing Fantasy-style parallel universe out there somewhere in which Lee and Ditko never parted company and went on spinning intricate webs of narrative to ensnare us for decades more. Maybe they’re poolside in LA right now clinking piña coladas. In the hearts of True Believers ‘tis so.

Draw up a chair

“From the Floor of 64” was the British Power Comics’ version of Marvel’s “Bullpen Bulletins” – a page of gossip, insider info and tantalizing glimpses of upcoming projects. I’ve no doubt that’s a big reason why I was such a staunch fan. Stan Lee (and, over here in the UK, his emulators Alf Wallace and co) knew how to create an inviting sense of community.

DC titles carried a letters page, but there was nothing to glue the whole slate together the way Marvel did. (Also, the coolest their characters got was Batman – and back then he was no Spidey, I’ll tell you that.)

If you look at Bullpen Bulletins pages from the mid-‘60s now, your impression is likely to be, “This was Marvel’s website.” The theory of community was in their genes, even though the technology was still thirty years away.

They also had the letters pages, of course. Most of what got discussed went a little over my head at age 10, but I liked it that way. It made me feel that the comics I enjoyed weren’t just for kids (not that “just” for kids is any kind of a bad thing anyway). Listening in on that thoughtful, intensely enthusiastic dialogue between readers and creators taught me how to think about stories.

At some point we’re going to set up a letters page – I mean a forum – for discussing Mirabilis like that. Any and all suggestions welcome. Excelsior!