• Along the same lines, the “Hero-Halo” of the Doom Patrol character Flex Mentallo — a riff on a Charles Atlas ad that had appeared in so many ’60s comics that readers could be counted on to catch the joke.
• Jules Feiffer’s Tantrum, a 200-page comics story about a middle-aged man who decides to become two years old, drawn around the same time as his old employer Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, but obviously much, much faster.
• The “Judge Dredd” stories published in the British weekly comic 2000 A.D. in the ’80s, in which Dredd, a quasi-fascist policeman who protects a gigantic future city, takes time off from fighting crime to quash the city’s nascent pro-democracy movement — writers John Wagner and Alan Grant were very aware that there was a repugnant subtext to their hero, and cheerfully exposed it.
• Colleen Coover’s minicomic Star of the East, a heartbreaking little improvisation based on three words (“bunny,” “scooter,” “football”) given to her by her partner, Paul Tobin.
Every one of these gives me joy to see and to recall, as well as to share with other people who’ve experienced them, or to pass along to other people who want to see them too. That’s what I love most about comics as a culture: it’s united not just by liking the same sorts of things but by communicating about them. The medium is built on a tradition of entertainment and reflective pleasure and out-and-out fun. The enjoyment is only redoubled by people who care about talking about it — and arguing about it — with each other.
Douglas Wolk is the author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, to be published July 2 by Da Capo, from which this essay was adapted.
