Or Opening Boxes in the Attic
I’ve not been gifted with an organized mind. It is rather like an attic, (my attic, actually; are our attics perhaps accurate manifestations of our minds?) not very big, with roof beams I continually bang my head on in a moment of inattention when straightening up after having examined something closely, and generally crammed full of both forgotten things and needful things, (which are always in the back, at the very bottom) where everything goes until it’s needed. Or not. Do our minds ever spring clean? Throw old things out? I doubt it.
I admire people who can focus on certain aspects of life.
As for me, I can no more imagine doing that than walking through a landscape and look ONLY at one or two features. It would be like reducing life to a specialized profession. Of course, our obsessions and interest do that anyway, but nevertheless… drawing pictures of recognizable things means the impossible task of recognizing everything, which, if it does little to rationalize the clutter, certainly keeps one’s eyes open. I would far rather occasionally loose sight of my career goals than miss too many sunsets.
If some system of logic could be applied to my mind (likely an operation as diffcult as it would be pointless), it would be an organisation by image.
When I was small, I would end up bickering with my father over the books he took from the library (he was a voracious reader with a penchant for Westerns).
“You’ve read that one already!” I’d pipe up, likely interrupting a gunfight or a stampede.
“Of course not!” he’d reply. “First time I’ve read this.”
“But I remember the cover!” I remember that horse and that cowboy!”
This would go on for a while until he reminded me that getting shot or trampled would be nothing compared to the risk I was currently running, and I would strategically withdraw to nurse my injured visual pride (“Is so!”) from a safer distance.
It never occurred to me at the time that editors of westerns likely swapped covers and re-used illustrations with a certain freedom, but I never forgot one.
My first paperback purchases were FOR the covers. With my best pal, we would raid all the used book places , searching for covers by the famous Frank Frazetta (this teen-age infatuation took place long before the first Ballantine editions of his work). It was a cuthroat treasure hunt to be sure, and there were covers he got that I would have knocked him on the head for (and left him buried under a pile of musty paperbacks). I followed the Frazetta’s new work diligently, buying paperbacks by the dozen. I think I likely even read some of them. Equally likely, they were probably pretty bad.
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Covers by Frazetta for the Ace Books Science Fiction Classics. New: between 40 and 60 cents – by the time I got them used: likely around 20… but priceless in my eyes. I slavishly copied – in oil pastel no less – covers like Savage Pellucidar and Lost on Venus.
I was livid with envy that my friend could buy magazines like Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, publications I didn’t dare show around my house – his parents were rather more easy-going, or at least inattentive. (I ordered many back-issues later on, especially the Frazetta covers – all in the attic now.)
Having already attributed the role of Zeus, other artists held in high esteem peopled this private Olympus: Jeff Jones, Roy Krenkel, Michael Kaluta and many others.
I devoured Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan, Berni Wrightson’s Swamp Thing. I was enamoured of Barry Windsor-Smith’s attention to detail and costume. (Admittedly not a strong point in mainstream American comics in the ‘70’s – when it was taken over by the ubiquitous and prolific John Buscema, is sank back into the action-packed but unattractive and uninspiring until I gave up on it.)
I pored over the boxes of old Saturday Evening Post magazines that I discovered in the attic.
I collected “Tumbleweeds”, a strangely drawn cowboy comic strip, and Tarzan by Russ Manning, who had inherited it from Burne Hogarth. I admired the paintings by Tom Lovell in National Geographic, though it’s only a short while ago that I put his name to the images I knew by heart.
My first foray into art history was a book on Gustave Doré, in the remaindered bin at the local co-op. (I am more and more convinced some deus ex machina was involved here – remember, this was small-town dirt-farm South-western British Columbia, so WHY the supermarket-cum-hardware store ended up with this book is incomprehensible.) I was suddenly transformed from the sullen kid dragged along to go (oh so bo-oring) grocery shopping to a strident advocate of ART who refused to leave the place until a few cans went back on shelves and the purchase was made.
Only much later on, after my simultaneous disembarkment in both the age of reason and in Europe, did I realize there was much more to the art world than comic books, even well-drawn ones.
Actually, arriving in France was rather a shock – my images of France had been irrevocably tinted by the copies of Paris Match that the French teacher let us carefully leaf through in grade eight. They were all from the 40’s, and must have been rather precious to her, but they left me with the indelible impression that Paris was several decades behind Vancouver – I was almost surprised to find Europe was in colour on arriving.
Speaking of old magazines, I recently found the issue of National Geographic from the month of my birth. It is amazing, ads for cars that have fins like space ships, super eight cameras and Caribbean cruises my folks could never have afforded. What a healthy and wholesome world National Geographic brought to our homes. “Every student needs a Remington Quiet-Riter Portable.” ($1.00 per week) “You can save a lot of calories by sweetening with Sucaryl (and you won’t taste the difference).” The blithe wholesomeness of the whole publication is stunning – no issues with acid rains, melting glaciers, spewing smokestacks – just a gallery of pleasant landscapes of a simpler world behind the token National Geographic girl (wholesome rosy-cheeked, hair fashionably trim, smart shorts, checkered outdoorsy shirt and bandana). No wonder we invented the generation gap…
I’m a great believer in the power of images to act on us long after we have forgotten them.
Want to hear something scary? On the living room wall of my wife’s parents’ home in Tehran, and for as long as she can remember, there was a little wood bas-relief of the Castle of Chillon. Remind you of anything?
See what I mean?
And here I started out to write something else entirely. But that’s what happens when you start opening boxes in an attic.
And didn’t I say I had trouble focusing?
SAN DIEGO (AND BACK AGAIN)
The documentary THERE AND BACK AGAIN will be screened at the San Diego Comic Con on Sunday July 23rd at 2:05 pm. The schedule for the film screenings is on the Comic Con site.
