MAD About Comics

The other day, my mother handed me a Hartman suitcase she’d found in her attic. Even without opening it, I knew exactly what lay within that smooth leather treasure box.

My comics once lived at my father’s house, in the top two drawers of my dresser. When I left for college, those well-thumbed magazines and books were too cumbersome to bring along, yet too precious to throw away. Thanks, mom, for keeping them. Many such collections have been lost for want of a large enough attic.

These magazines are more than just thin, aged pages. They’re my friends and teachers. I studied comics as if they held the meaning of life. Not the boy-girl drama in Archie or the political propaganda in MAD, but the humor in all of them. I desperately wanted to know how to make people laugh.

Why? Who knows. Probably some personal flaw. It seemed important at the time. Right up there with the skills advertised on the cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine: “How to Act Bored on a Date,” “Touching His No-No Square,” and the “Best Beauty Advice for Forgettable Faces.”

Betty, Veronica, Archie, Reggie, and, especially, Jughead, hid the secrets to being funny, which was more attainable than being attractive. I studied their stories and tried to learn what they knew.

Fortunately, I had abundant time on my hands. At my father’s house, I stayed up late, leafing through those drawers of comics, re-reading and sorting them by favorites, topics, and date. I like sorting almost as much as I like reading.

My comic collection was published in the 1960s through 1990s, thirty years of teen-targeted humor. If these books are any indication, teens haven’t changed much. The pop culture references shift, but the gist remains the same. The Indigestible MAD is just as funny as it was in 1963, when it was published, and in 1993, when I acquired it.

“Where did I get those comics from long ago?” you ask.

The flea mall. My hometown hosts the “Largest Flea Mall on the East Coast,” a cornucopia of curiosities – discount electronics, crafts, antique farm equipment, and tables of used books. Comics were ten cents, a quarter, fifty cents a piece; my treasures were mined in the wild.

Marmaduke, Peanuts, Katy Keene, Garfield, Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes – it wasn’t just Archie and MAD; I’d read anything that promised a laugh. I chased that feeling of frivolity and absurdity wherever it could be found, and I do still.

An author’s writing may be educational, poetic, suspenseful, and complex, but if it’s not funny, I’ll come away unimpressed. Those who can keep me smiling attain the status of superheroes. At last night’s Carteret Writers meeting, one guy specialized in humor writing. He was a stand-up comic, and the piece he shared was laugh-out-loud good. I just wanted to pack him up and seal him in a leather briefcase.

But don’t tell him that. He may not think it’s funny.

– Jessi Waugh