Comic book writer Gerard Jones will be reading at the March Monthly Rumpus. He graciously agreed to answer some questions via e mail.
S.A. What do you plan on reading at the Rumpus event?
G.J. I'm going to be reading something from my book-in-the-works, The Undressing of America. Probably a chunk from early in the book about how mass publishing swept over American culture like a flood—or a scourge—in the mid-19th century, and how we're still sort of playing out the culture wars that started in response. I might go for something specifically about how sexual information was the most alarming part of the flood, and who rose up to fight back against the tide of intimate revelation.
S.A. How did you get interested in the history of publishing?
G.J. [It’s] actually kind of a weird route. I spent my thirties as a comic book writer, writing superheroes for Marvel and DC and creating my own odd comics for small publishers, but also writing history and criticism about comics. I'd been a huge comics geek in my teens and into my twenties, and a lot of my work in comics was about seeking my creative roots in old pulp. Marvel Comics basically saved me from depression and despair when I was 13, and for decades I was still intoxicated by the smell of the pulp and the look and feel of that cheap, yellowing paper. Most of the founding fathers of comic books were still around then, and I could go into an almost out-of-body state sitting and listening to their stories of the old days. I learned my dad had been nursed on the milk of wood pulp too—The Shadow gave him an island in a brutal '30s childhood. And then I ended up writing Shadow comic books, and I had this feeling of a river of four-color ink running down through the 20th century, pumping through the veins of generations of wounded kids.
So when I got out of writing comics I wrote a book called Men of Tomorrow, about the roots of comics in geekdom and sad adolescence and the violence of American life in the immigrant waves and the economic churnings of the past century. But writing that I caught on that comics were just white caps on a bigger wave—cheap paper and ink were a primary carrier of new ideas, information, values, and driving personal fantasies from before the Civil War to the TV era, and still to a great extent up until the Internet took over. Especially for the poor, the young, immigrants, and the adventurously socially mobile, magazines and newspapers both expressed and shaped people's expectations and self-descriptions. And there were wars fought over them: circulation wars where people got their heads bashed in and culture wars where people were driven to ruin and suicide or swept from obscurity to power.
I started trying to get my head around that, to understand just how big this subterranean paper ocean had been, and then these past few years it's really been coming home to me that the age of paper is ending, or at least it's changing fundamentally. So I wanted to write a paean to it, and try to open up some partial revelation of what it had been—because, you know, you can't really see how your family's affecting you until you move out, and you can't really get what publishing meant until it's fading away—by looking hard at one part of it that hadn't been looked at very much. But one part that I discovered was really powerful, the way magazines drove this whole culture of talking about our private selves and talking about other people's private selves that we're still moving through.
S.A. Can you expand on “circulation wars where people got their heads bashed in and culture wars where people were driven to ruin and suicide or swept from obscurity to power.”?
G.J. The first part's simple: In the early 20th Century, battles over newspaper distribution routes and control of corner newsstands were fought by local thugs who killed quite a few of their rivals. The newspapers played a huge role in the formation of organized crime in this country—Lucky Luciano and Dion O'Bannion got their start doing circulation for Hearst before Prohibition made them rich.
Second part, I'm thinking mainly of two of the big figures in my book: Anthony Comstock, an obscure dry-goods salesman who became one of the most powerful men in American culture—the chief censor of both the federal and New York state governments—through his unrelenting battle against indecent publications in the late 19th century; and Bernarr Macfadden, a professional wrestler and bodybuilder from the Ozarks who became the most successful magazine publisher of the 1920s, and one whose influence is still being felt in mass culture, by fighting back against Comstock with health publications, sex-education books, and finally the genre of confessional and "true story" magazines, which he basically created.
S.A. What do you say to people who say that comics are too violent or are of no literary value, that kids should be reading more substantial material?
G.J. I tell them to buy Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Violence Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (Basic Books 2002). But if they don't want to buy my book. . . .
This is a criticism that has been leveled at almost every popular medium over the past two centuries, and it always comes clear with time that the people who don't see any value just don't know how to see it. Violence is indigenous to the human imagination, and the accusation that any artistic creation is "too violent" says a lot about the observer but really nothing about the object. And there's so much more there than violence: the "Marvel Comics generation" has produced so many good writers, filmmakers, artists, and academics who cite the comics as among their great influences—Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Art Spiegelman, and on and on—that there's obviously something powerful in there.
S.A. The lack of available newspapers changes the immigrant experience how? Immigrants don't usually arrive with a computer or an iphone and let's face it, you need a computer to communicate these days; we're communicating by computer right now. Signing up for free online access at the library can be cumbersome and time consuming so in some ways it's strengthened word of mouth communication, hasn't it?
G.J. Well, word of mouth is always the main cement of any community, but mass media feeds and shapes word of mouth. So what communities can the Internet feed or not feed? Because that’s the paradox of the thing, isn't it? It's free and universal and democratic...except it isn't. Millions of people across the world have watched that French bulldog puppy trying to roll over, but the guy tarring the roof of the house next door to mine has probably never heard of it.
Newspapers used to play a central role in immigrant communities—both holding the community together as apart from the mainstream and also helping people figure out how America works and becoming part of the new country, and I mean both native-language papers and mainstream papers that had immigrant audiences in mind. They also gave immigrants a way to get their stories out there and change the country they were working their way into. You know, Joseph Pulitzer, who did more than anybody to shape the modern newspaper and by extension American mass media in general (Hearst was just a Pulitzer wannabe with family money), arrived in this country as an adult, flat broke, barely speaking English. A Hungarian Jew in rural Missouri in the depth of the post-Civil War depression figured out how to build a bridge of newsprint between all the groups who made up this mongrel country—and he midwifed the comic strip in the process. Comics were right in the middle of the process.
The importance of newspapers and cheap magazines dropped as movies and radio and then TV rose, but they've kept playing a role right to the present. What happens as they vanish . . . I don't know.
S.A.Do you think paper publishing has hit rock bottom yet? Can we expect a resurgence soon?
G.J. I don't think paper has hit bottom by any means, but I also don't think it will be a quick or simple fall. There will be bumps and twists and surprises on the road down. Print on paper will never go away, because some people will love it and be willing to go to the effort and expense of keeping it alive. I mean, horses aren't extinct, right? But I'm not holding my breath for them to retake their position at the forefront of transportation, either.
S.A. Did you get the Panorama recently put out by McSweeney's?
G.J. Yeah, and it was really fun. It's exactly the kind of thing that subcultures produce when they're fading out of the mainstream—expensive, resplendent, nostalgic. Festive, not quotidian. Rodeos became show biz and an art form when the horse culture ended.
S.A. Do you own a Kindle?
G.J. No. I spend enough time staring at backlit screens as it is.
S.A. Favorite comic book character?
G.J. Lester Girls from The Trouble with Girls, who I and a couple of collaborators made up. But if you mean comic book characters created by other people a long time ago and owned by big corporations . . . I've got a very warm spot for the Fantastic Four, but I only liked them as they were done by their creators in the '60s. I used to like Batman, and enjoyed writing him, until they overdid the Dark shit. I wrote Green Lantern for years, so he's like an old war buddy. But I must not love any of them that much because I haven't read a superhero comic for years.
Gerard Jones started as a humor writer with The Beaver Papers (Crown 1983) and a long stint at National Lampoon. He then wrote comics for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse and other publishers. His books include Honey, I'm Home (St. Martin's 1993) Killing Monsters (Basic Books 2002), Men of Tomorrow (Basic 2005) and now The Undressing of America (Farrar, Strauss, &Giroux, forthcoming). He also has a graphic novel titled, Networked: Carabella on the Run, (illustrations by Mark Badger) coming out this summer from NBM Grapic Novels. He grew up in Los Gatos and Gilroy, CA, and has lived in San Francisco since 1980. He is member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. He will be reading at the Make-Out Room on March 8th, as part of The Monthly Rumpus along with Jami Attenberg, Jesse Nathan, and Mark Morford. Also on the bill will be Chicken John, K.Flay, and comedian Nato Green. The event starts at 7 p.m. Advance tickets are strongly encouraged and can be purchased at Brown Paper Tickets for ten dollars.
The Make-Out Room is located at 3225 22nd Street.
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