Who Doesn't Like Make-Believe?

Tonight I picked up David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, which has been sitting for a while now in my ever-daunting pile of to-read books. Flipping through the prologue, I came across what to me was an obvious but still wowzer statistic – that in the 1940s, at the height of their popularity, “comics were selling between eighty million and a hundred million copies every week, with a typical issue passed along or traded to six to ten readers, thereby reaching more people than movies, television, radio, or magazines for adults.”

When we started this thing, point one we made was that we came to this as moviegoers, not comic book readers (maybe why we haven’t asked our fellow critic Marc Savlov to chime in – let’s be honest, we knew he’d wipe the floor with us). But in all our jousting, I’d hate for us to come off as seeming flip about comic books, because there’s an astonishingly rich history there. At the risk of spouting off about something I know very little, comic books, at least in their infancy, seemed to be an especially American enterprise, an artform up there with jazz that our nation could thump its chest proudly about: Yeah, we got there first.

Personally, I never got there, but I respect how intimate the relationship is between a comic and the comic book reader. A sidenote of sorts: I had a conversation today with our art director, Jason Stout – a comic book lover (and a gifted artist himself). Jason has two children, and we got to talking about how comic book movies aren’t really made for kids. They skew older, darker, and for the most part are too mature for really young audiences. Our modern comic book movies are made by and for comic book devotees, who – perhaps greedily – want the comics to grow up alongside them. There’s a reason top-line directors like Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan and Bryan Singer are devoting the prime of the careers to comic book movies (not to mention, farther back, such disparate talents as Robert Altman and Vittorio Storaro). Call me naïve, but I don’t think it’s because, bottom-line, comic-book movies are big business. I think it’s because this stuff lights a fire in them, the same as it does for millions of comic book fans.

I’ll never love these characters as profoundly as someone who grew up with them – I came late to the party, and I’ll probably only know them at a respectful distance – but I absolutely understand what it’s like for a fictional world to seep into your bones and inspire you, especially at a young age – maybe because fantasy and adventure, like The Neverending Story and Willow (to name a few from my childhood), are told with broad enough strokes to leave room to imagine yourself into the narrative.

I’ve written about this before, but Swiss Family Robinson – first the book, then the movie – consumed my childhood, second only to Star Wars. I knew the Robinsons like I knew the Joneses, and I took on their story and made it my own. (Possibly because the Joneses tended to vacation in less exotic climes. Like Six Flags Over Texas.) I won’t go into detail about the years I spent elaborately mocking up treehouse floorplans, designing a line of shipwreck-inspired clothing, and writing whole new stories about the next three ships that washed up on the shore to join the Robinson clan... not to mention the other kind of preadolescent awakening that happened when Fritz island-hopped sans shirt...

Actually, I think I just did go into detail. Maybe too much.

So what I’m wondering is, what did it for you? You’ve mentioned Indiana Jones – what other childhood films got your brain buzzing and your imagination fired up?