The Kid Met Him in the Funny Pages

Merry Christmas, Kid, welcome back to your old hometown now try to find a homie, a compadre, a chum, a confidante a mate. The Kid wasn’t having much success along the friendship line.

Then Miss Ezrah struck some cord within him with something new he had never tried. She told the third grade class to write a story, not some “What I did over Christmas vacation” story or “What was my favorite toy” story, either. A real story, a fiction just like some of those in their reader, something with made up characters, a plot and a climax.

Don’t know about any of the others in that class, but The Kid had never tried writing a story. He made up stories in his head all the time when playing. It was what one did when they lived alone and had no one else about. It was called imagination. Why should writing a story be much different, except you wrote it out on paper, not just in your head?

The Kid was already a voracious reader. His mother had this incredible collection of books he read. They were kind of squat and thick with a lot of pictures or illustrations dispersed through them. They were called “Big little Books”.

They weren’t short stories; for gosh sakes, they were books, like novels. Some were novelizations of motion pictures, some reprints of classics, adventures of radio heroes like Green Hornet, Sunday papers detectives like Dick Tracy and they often featured famous names, like Frank Buck or Tom Mix and even Mickey Mouse.

So The Kid got out his paper and pencil and he wrote a story. It no longer exists either as an artifact or in the memory of The Old Goat other than a couple minute flickers. It was some kind of Western and the villain was known as Mr. X. The Kid turned it in to Miss Ezrah who read it to the class and Miss Ezrah was very complimentary about this tale. She not only awarded The Kid with an A, but put his story up on a bulletin board for display.

In the heart of The Kid a spark was struck.

That is not the amazing part of this long ago event; it had a more important outcome, one that seemed highly unlikely.

There was another boy in the class and there was something different about him, too. For one thing, he sometimes got picked for team sports even after The Kid. He was kind of awkward at times and very tall for his age. The Kid was tall, but this boy was taller. Because both were tall, the boy sat near The Kid in class, somewhere in the back. Yeah, teachers often drew up seating charts based on height. This tall boy was called upon to read his story.

The tall boy was reading and familiar scenes were forming in The Kid’s mind. The characters names were strange, it appeared they were human people in this story, it was some kind of adventure, it…it had been in that spare room back in the swamp.

Yes, yes it had, it had been near the top of a stack because it was recent. It was one of his favorites. The Kid had read it more than once.

“I read that in an Uncle Scrooge comic,” he blurted out.

The Kid hasn’t the foggiest of what happened immediately next. There might have been embarrassment all around. The rest of that scene slipped into a deep recess of The Kid’s brain and for the life of him The Old Goat can’t extract it.

But it was a different story after class and after school. The Kid, who lived right near the school and the tall boy who didn’t were walking in the same direction. The tall boy behind and gaining across the schoolyard with his longer stride made The Kid nervous. He had squealed on this guy, called him out right there in class before everyone. Was this tall kid going to beat him up?

Comic books in those days had advertising and a popular item being marketed to the youthful readers was the Daisy Air Rifle, the most popular of which was the Red Rider Bee Bee Gun (as some may recall if they saw the film, “A Christmas Story” and who hasn’t). Perhaps this tall guy would be back with a rifle and assault The Kid with the stinging pellets of revengeful death.

“Hey,” it was the tall boy.

The Kid froze.

“You like comic books?” the tall boy asked.

The Kid shook his head.

“You got many?”

The Kid shook his head.

“Wanna trade?”

The Kid    

The Tall Boy

Comics 52 Pages in Color For a Dime

When The Kid began third grade his family lived in a swamp. During the Christmas break, they moved back to town and with the New Year of 1950 The Kid went to a new school, which had been his old school. Although the hallways of learning here were familiar and the faces around him were familiar, the friendships of first grade had somehow dissolved during the time he was elsewhere. He found making new friends difficult.

One friend from the early days stuck with him, but she was a girl. All her other friends were girls so they automatically kind of became The Kid's friends too. Perhaps if The Kid were 16 he would have found this a situation to glory in, but he was 8 and hanging around girls seemed more a detriment to making male friends than helping. Besides he was taking grief for his lack of skill in team sports and becoming skilled at the less-than-manly arts of hopscotch, jacks and skip rope didn’t seem the best image to develop. Maybe it was better to downplay his friendship with the girl next door while at school.

Of course The Kid was very naïve in thinking this, if not out-and-out shallow. After all, the girl had been loyal to him when none of his other former friends had. Avoiding her companionship at school wasn’t going to change anything anymore than his switch in baseball caps did. He had been branded as the Swamp Thing, the Hick from the Sticks, The West Whiteland Wimp, the Doofus from Glenloch and any new friends probably weren’t going to come from the jock cabal.

It didn’t help that he quickly became a teacher’s pet. It wasn’t by choice. He didn’t campaign for the position nor did he seek it. His shyness, his quietude, his deportment just always seemed to lead to it. It didn’t help he had a couple skills that brought him to notice. One of those skills combined with what had been in a spare room of the house back in the swamp, was going to lead him to the longest lasting, most bestest friendship of his life.

 So what was it lurking in that upstairs room at the house in the swamp. Was it Aladdin’s Lamp or some exotic magic amulet?

Not at all, it was something marvelously mundane. It was stacks of comic books that stood as high as The Kid. These were comics The Kid’s father had bought and saved and stored over the years.

There were new comics, because by this time The Kid was spending his own meager allowance on such mind-rotting literature, at least in the opinion of the academia and other anal retentive types. After all, these do-gooders of doom did eventually drive The Crypt Keeper, The Old Witch and The Vault Keeper into Mad magazine and turn them into Alfred E. Newman.

These self-declared guardians of good taste and youthful morals even got Congress involved, trying to out from the closet Batman and Robin and Green Arrow and Speedy, and any other super hero who dragged a young boy along on his adventures.  They saw in this a great homosexual conspiracy to capture the youth of America, instead of the more obvious idea that the comic book reader of those days was a kid and these boy wonders would give them a figure to identify with. Of course, the comic book publishers were as wrong as the Congressmen and their so-called brain trusts. The Kid never imagined himself in the green shorts of Robin, but in the dark cowl and cloak of the Caped Crusader.  I mean, come on, who wanted to be some kid in the shadows of a great man?  The Kid was already too often in the shadow of others.

There were all kinds of comics stacked in that room some new and some very old. There were ones in those stacks that dated from the very beginning of the form in the early 1930s such as “Funnies on Parade” and “Famous Funnies”. These comic books began as reprints of the Sunday comics in the newspapers, although some of these issues used daily strips and weren’t in color.

But how was this treasure trove of comic books going to lead to an important friendship for The Kid? That will have to wait for the moment, but all secrets will be explained soon.