Funnybooks

Funnybooks.

That’s what my Uncle Ralph always called the comics he brought me. He’d show up at the back door of our home in suburban Cranston, Rhode Island, carrying a brown corrugated cardboard box. “It fell off the back of a truck,” he’d say.

I was six years old, and didn’t know that “fell off a truck” meant “stolen.” All I knew was that Uncle Ralph worked for a shipping company, and how lucky we were that he was there to catch the things that fell off the trucks and share his good fortune with us.

Sometimes the carton would be full of envelopes, and I’d spend hours writing letters to imaginary friends in far-away places. Other times they had paper – what my mother called “stationery” – that I drew pictures on with crayons or pencils. But many times, the best times, he brought comic books, in colorful piles like autumn leaves. “I got funnybooks for Eddie.”

Because the comic books were only for me. My parents might use the envelopes and paper, but they had no interest in funnybooks, and my little sister Debra couldn’t read yet. I could read, though, voraciously, insatiably. When I tired of my children’s books, I would pull down the thick burgundy volumes of the encyclopedia my parents somehow managed to afford. I would read the entries and look at the pictures. A few years later, teachers at my school would test my reading skills – and many other abilities – then exchange bewildered looks and, the next day, make me line up with the fourth graders instead of the third graders.

Not all the funnybooks were the good kind. Some were about characters like Baby Huey, an oversized duckling who innocently caused chaos with his unsuspected strength, or Millie the Model, a pretty blonde woman who wore a different extravagant outfit in every frame. Some were even about real people, like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. I only read those when I was desperate, when I was finished reading the good kind.

 

The good kind were the adventures of superheroes: Batman and Robin, Green Lantern, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Challengers of the Unknown , Doom Patrol. Reading these comics, I learned of radioactivity and centrifugal force, magnetism and refraction, chemicals and electricity, airplanes and rockets, red suns and yellow suns. I first read the word “scientist” in a comic book, and knew that this was the job I wanted most in life, a childhood revelation that eventually led to a doctorate in theoretical physics.

And the best, the most wonderful, the greatest of all the superheroes, was Superman.

Superman!

Just speaking his name brings his image to my eyes. Tall, muscular, handsome, with wavy hair so black, it was blue. Clad in his blue uniform with red boots and trunks, the red and yellow S symbol on his chest, the cape flowing down his back.

Superman could fly. Lift cars and ships. See through walls . Vaporize hurricanes with his heat vision. Hear bad guys plotting in their hideouts. And withstand their bullets and bombs with no harm whatsoever. He was perfect in every way, and in a way that never conflicted with my understanding of God – a distinction that many grown-ups, even now, cannot grasp.

I wanted to be Superman. Not surprising for a small, skinny boy with no athletic ability at all. I wanted his super-strength to fight the battles I had to run away from. I wanted his invulnerable skin to withstand the daily attacks of life. I wanted his Fortress of Solitude, so I could escape the world and have a place to be just me.

I didn’t have any of those things. But I did have a red vest and a blue shirt and blue pants, and whenever I wore them I was, for a time, Superman. Even now, if I happen to wear something red and something blue at the same time, I feel that I am, somehow, Superman. Disguised in my secret identity, perhaps, but still Superman. When I’m working out at the gym in my blue shorts and red t-shirt, struggling to move a fifty-pound weight, I am also, in some way, the Man of Steel who bench-presses planets. It helps.

My first significant mathematical insight also occurred because of comic books. Comics cost ten cents each in those days, and I would save up twenty cents to buy two at once. The problem was that if you spent twenty cents, the store charged a penny tax. So, I would do my thorough research at the rack of comics, and select two to buy. I would pay my ten cents for the first one, then return to the rack for the second one, which I would also pay ten cents for. Two comics: twenty cents: no tax. Later, in college, I became a math major, took many courses in abstract mathematics, and even taught calculus. But few achievements in math gave me such satisfaction as devising this strategy that meant a free comic book every ten trips to the store.

These days, it’s amusing to see vintage issues of comics selling for five-figure prices, knowing that I used to own those very issues. I never saved my funnybooks. When I was done reading them enough times, I would give them away or trade them to my friends or cousins. For me, their value was never how much they could be sold for: it was how much they meant to me.

Funnybooks taught me more than science and math. Even though Superman had amazing powers, even though he could do anything – even though he was Superman! – he still had problems. He had to deal with everyday life, with people, with complications, with the unexpected, with a world that often didn’t make sense: he was like me. And if he was like me, even if just a little, then that meant I was like him, even if just a little.

Clearly, superheroes have had a great influence on my own life. But I believe that these amazing characters and their stories have important lessons for everyone – lessons for the mind, the emotions, and the spirit. They show us good and evil, greed and generosity, courage and cowardice, betrayal and loyalty, cleverness and deception, selfishness and self-sacrifice. The toil and the triumph of ordinary life, as well as worlds and possibilities beyond the everyday. Why the struggle is worth it, and where to find the strength to continue the struggle for one moment more. 

Maybe even how we can become super ourselves.

And it all began with funnybooks.