Bear with me. I eventually mention comic books in this post, honest.
My wife Kathy Parham is the Executive Director (and one of the founders) of the Children's Playhouse, an art space for preschoolers in our home town of Boone, North Carolina. The Playhouse is a children's museum where kids go to paint pictures, mold clay, make a mess, and participate in storytimes and special programs.
My involvement in the Playhouse is usually limited to taking care of our kids (Nate, 11, and Mercer, 7) when Kath has a nighttime board meeting, but I'm proud of the work she does. The Playhouse is important for the same reason libraries and public swimming pools are important: civic spaces like these defy the tendency towards isolation and "cocooning" in American culture. The Playhouse gives bored parents and bored kids a place to get together with friends and have fun. Recently, Kathy told me about two Chinese immigrants, a little boy and his grandfather, who come to the Playhouse even though neither of them speaks English. About two weeks ago, the grandfather was talking to his grandson in Cantonese, when another adult who happened to be at the Playhouse at the time, an American mother with her son, interrupted their conversation with a few sentences in Cantonese herself. The grandfather was overjoyed to find someone in Boone (a small town in Appalachia) who spoke his language, and the adults chatted for a while before exchanging phone numbers. The Playhouse is indispensable because it builds social capital by encouraging connections like these.
Because the Playhouse is a non-profit agency, fundraising is a priority, and Kath spends a lot of her time writing grant applications, soliciting donations from local businesses, and organizing charity events. One event, scheduled for August 2008, is the second annual Playhouse Family Music Festival, featuring the performer Billy Jonas, local and regional bands, food and craft booths, and other activities. (Don't worry: I'm not writing this post to dun you into buying a ticket...unless you'll be in Western North Carolina around August 16th.) Kath worked like crazy on last year's festival, but I didn't do much except watch the kids while she put in 13-hour days. This year, though, Nate, Mercer and I want to be more involved. We've decided to collect used kid's books from now until August, and then sell the books at a festival booth, with all our profits going to the Playhouse. We've dubbed our project "Operation Ramona," after Ramona Geraldine Quimby, our favorite children's book character and the subject of Beverly Cleary's wonderful series of novels. I'm embarrassed to admit that I never heard of Cleary until I read books like Henry and Beezus (1952), Ramona the Pest (1968) and Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) out loud to Nate and Mercer, but I still thought she was great--one of the best American authors of the twentieth century, actually--so naming our little enterprise after Ramona is perfect.
We're off to a good start collecting books. Over the last few weekends, the kids and I got up early on Saturday morning and went around to yard sales looking for cheap kid's books. (Our sneaky plan is to sell these books at a 25 cent mark-up; if we buy a book at a yard sale for 50 cents, we'll sell it at the Music Festival for 75 cents, and donate the whole 75 cents to the Playhouse.) The yard sale books have to be in decent condition, and they have to be of good quality too: no crappy paperbacks based on crappy movies, no poorly-drawn Barbie books. A couple of the books we've bought that live up to our Olympian standards are a hardcover Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Treasury and an illustrated edition of Little Women. We also found a box of beautifully-carved wooden animals that I think we'll just donate directly to the Playhouse. Just spreading the word among friends and family has yielded results. When our pals Carrie, Gabriel and Hannah moved from Boone to California two weeks ago, they bequeathed to us several boxes of books (inside of which were a hardcover Hatful of Seuss and stacks of young adult novels by authors like Lois Lowry and Gary Paulson).
Surprisingly, I've decided to sell a lot of my old comic books at the Operation Ramona booth too. For most of my life, I was a typical comics collector (bag, board, hoard), but in the last few years I've come to prefer the graphic novel format and I avoid buying floppies whenever I'm patient enough to wait for the eventual collection. So now I have a couple of longboxes full of floppies I don't want anymore, or don't need because I have the material in collected form, and I'm ready to thin the herd. I plan to sell my unwanted comics at a bargain-basement price: 25 cents apiece, 5 for a dollar.
Of course, I don't intend to peddle my extra copy of Big Ass Funnies #1 at the Music Festival, so I've had to sift through the longboxes to find floppies appropriate for kids. While sifting, I also came across comics that are technically "age-appropriate" but so bad that I just can't sell them to children. (Even as I type, my issues of Youngblood--not so many, I swear!--and my almost complete run of Dazzler are being pulped at the recycling plant.) It seemed inconsistent for me to carefully choose the books I find at garage sales, while putting rotten comics up for sale, so I decided to include in Operation Ramona only those floppies that I'd let Nate and Mercer read. Comics of reasonable quality (or better), not junk. So what am I going to sell? Here's a partial list:
Marvel Tales and Marvel's Greatest Comics reprints of classic Lee/Ditko/Romita Spider-Man and Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four stories. As most True Believers know, Marvel Tales and Marvel's Greatest Comics sometimes dropped pages and changed dialogue from the original stories, a practice that drives the purist in me absolutely insane. (How could the editors of these reprint titles bring themselves to omit Kirby's splash pages? How?) Besides, I own both the Spider-Man and FF Essentials collections and the 44 Years of the Fantastic Four DVD-Rom, which includes (as it says on the box) "over 550 complete printable comics cover to cover," along with fun stuff like scans of the original letters pages and Bullpen Bulletin pages, so I'm covered.
Fantastic Four issues written and drawn by John Byrne. I liked Byrne's work on the FF, but since the 44 Years DVD-Rom includes these issues, I don't need the hard copies. (I'm not quite ready to part with the floppies of Walt Simonson's brief FF run yet, even though they're on the DVD-Rom too, but maybe someday soon, after I mourn a bit.)
Gladstone and Gemstone Disney comics. Most of these include stories by Carl Barks, so they really need to be owned and read by little kids rather than sequestered away in my longboxes. Off they go.
The complete nine issues of Yeah! by Peter Bagge and Gilbert Hernandez. Even though I enjoyed Yeah!, it's a minor chapter in a couple of exemplary careers, and I don't have any desire to read the comics again. I can imagine early middle-schoolers being charmed by the series, though.
25 cents each, 5 for a dollar. And no adult customers, please: I want my comics to go to kids who'll read 'em to pieces and maybe learn to love the medium as a result. That's what happened to me. In 1970, I was seven years old, and I bought my first Marvel comic, Fantastic Four #104, at the worst possible time, two months after Jack Kirby gave up drawing the FF, quit Marvel, and defected to DC. The art in FF #104 was by John Romita--a workhorse in the Marvel Bullpen who by his own admission wasn't the visionary Kirby was--and I recall being underwhelmed, and thinking that I probably wouldn't bother spending 15 cents on comic books anymore. But a friend of my brother's, Gaspar "Gabby" Madonia (and doesn't that sound like the name of a member of the Newsboy Legion?), saw me reading the comic, mentioned that he had some old Fantastic Fours that he wanted to get rid of, and that he'd drop them off at my house sometime. When I came home from school the next day, my mom directed me to our couch, where Gabby had stacked over a hundred Silver Age comics. Many of them were FFs, but there was a healthy sampling of other Marvel titles (Thor, The Avengers, The Silver Surfer) too. I started reading, and within a week was a confirmed Marvel maniac; I read Fantastic Four Annual #6 and thought it was the keenest thing I'd ever seen in my life. The "secret origin" of my love for comics dates back to Gabby's gift. At the Operation Ramona booth, we're keeping prices low so that lots of kids buy comics, and I hope at least one child finds a comic as special to them as FF Annual #6 was to me.
My memories of collecting comics as a kid and teenager are inextricably bound up with memories of my neighborhood and my friends. I remember riding bikes with Joe Montante to buy comics at the Kohler-Redden drugstore, though occasionally we'd detour to Alt's drugstore, where they had a better selection of DCs (including the then-current Kirby Fourth World titles). I remember starting a comics club with my pals in Peter Marinaro's basement, and I remember cutting out some panels from X-Men #129--of Cyclops and Marvel Girl Kissing--to make a Valentine's Day card for my first girlfriend. One reason Beverly Cleary's books moved me even as an adult was that the Klickitat Street setting for most of her novels reminded me of my North Buffalo neighborhood, where groups of children delivered papers, played hide-and-seek, swapped comics, and were always out on the street. Those days are long gone--today architects give lip service to "the New Urbanism" even as more neighborhoods vanish and more McMansions go up--selling comics to the kids here in Boone might give me one final blast of nostalgia. At the very least, I'll have a little more closet space.
The Playhouse Music Festival is on August 16th. I'll write a follow-up post afterwards about the success (or--gulp!--failure) of Operation Ramona.
Comments