LOST TREASURES OF THE GOLDEN AGE

Nowadays, comics are industry, pure and simple -- capitalism at its finest. They're full of what sells. Flashy covers, glossy paper, skintight clothes and bare skin, kick-butt martial artists and supermodel women, all crossing over into today's popular watered-down pansy pseudo-violent TV cartoons. Books that promise big returns to collectors all for a swift $1.95, despite the fact that self-proclaimed markets have about as much validity as pyramid selling techniques and chain letters. Idealized in step with the 90's, which perhaps isn't an idealization at all: Call today's comics "Power Rangers for the Visually Addicted." There's a reason why the older comics are called the Golden and Silver Ages, and it's this:

They reflect life when the world was a kinder and gentler place -- where Camelot ruled, and the scent of the Kingdom of Summer graced the air.

Think about it. The Golden and Silver Age of comics reflect a much different, much more innocent view of the world. For one, superheroes never died. They never had to shower, sweat, or shave, and they never ever had to use the bathroom. Instead, they sat around in big clunky satellite clubhouses and played cribbage for fun instead of for money. And there was nothing beyond or beneath their capabilities: Superman and his friends were as apt to help a mewing calico out of a tree as they were to rehabilite a seemingly nefarious but actually misunderstood villain who just needed a little emotional support to pull himself out from the gutter. These were the heroes who ate cheeseburgers at the local diner, held down common-joe jobs so as to avoid the ennui of omnipotence, and fought to preserve the dignity of Lady Liberty from the world's only truly evil power, which was communism.

And comics even had one fist around the marketplace. The printed media, along with the radio, inhabited and filled the huge black gulf predating that needless, brain-eroding piece of machinery that eventually we named the Boob Tube.

My dad and I have relatively few common childhood experiences, but he still repeats a litany of episodes about how he and his brothers would head downtown to the drugstore after pooling up their allowances and their lawn-mowing money. (And this was back when the lawnmower was a mechanical, kinetic grass ripper, not one of these gas-run pushmowers or heart-disease-pampering ride-ons. No, this was that clattering clunking contraption of revolving whirligigs and chair springs -- a gerbel wheel with teeth -- that everyone's grandparents have locked away in the back of their cluttered garages, and the only more tedious way to mow would have been to gnaw the grass down mouthful by chlorophylic mouthful like The Lawnmower Man).

So they'd go to town, scampering to the drugstore with their pockets dripping pennies, and, well, go to town. The first order of business was generally cheap candy, with occassionally a soda or a popsicle thrown in, but there was always money left specifically for the Blackhawk comics and the Captain Marvel comics and the Action comics (and other comics so obsolete their names run out of my head like water through any of Bill Clinton's various alibis), all to be rolled up and shoved into the back pocket and toted out on expeditions across factory yards and train trestles, down through the trash dumps and along the canal bank -- any environment that intensified the reading ambience.

And that was the black irony of it all.

You see, those in my father's generation were the Heir Apparents: they were holding the fortunes of their middle age in their hands and they didn't even know it. They rolled up their comics. They ripped out the pages to hang on their walls. They doodled mustaches on the faces of the villains and laughed at their own ingenuity. They folded their comics and crinkled the covers and wiped their fannies with the pages and traded them for half a candy bar when their stomachs rumbled, and all along they hadn't the slightest inkling that Fate -- the most evil of all Las Vegas dealers -- was playing them for fools. They sold Christ for a measley thirty silvers. They abandoned hidden oil wells because they couldn't grow corn on the land. They traded their birthrights to Jacob for a bowl of lentil soup and didn't feel the monster shaft cleaning them out in every direction.

You see, they never expected that those comics would, one day, be able to pay for anything from perhaps a book to a TV to a halfway decent used car to a month of travelling to Europe to maybe (just maybe, for the very lucky few) the first half of a mortgage on their homes. They never got that nauseated feeling most people have when they throw truckloads of those prolific Clearinghouse Sweepstakes fliers into the trashcan and wonder deep down if they just lost out on the Five Million Dollar Winning Number. No, our parents continued on in ignorant bliss, buying comics and throwing away comics and buying new ones anew, all without recognizing the gold dust slipping through their fingers like the sands of time.

And so, sometimes I expect to see the waters of the Great Deluge gush from my father's eyes as he tells me how Poppop threw away his comic collection in a fit of rage over poor grades one cold winter in addition to giving him The Strap. I strongly believe that the world would seem much better off if punishments could be decided retroactively: "Please please let me take a double spanking now so I can cash the comics in for a hundred grand in twenty years! Please!"

Of course, our family always had poor fortune. I recently discovered that my great-grandfather abandoned some farmland out west that eventually became studded with oil wells, setting in motion the gears and springs that would allow Lady Luck to snub his descendents for generations to come. Oil for him. The Great Depression for my grandfather. Comic books for my dad. And most likely, for me, the winning Clearinghouse sweepstakes number that I just watched the trash lady cart out of my office. (But, as Pepe Le Peu would say, "C'est la Vie; Lady Luck ees maddeneen but still lovely, no?")

But this brings me to My Big Point, at long last. Are you still awake? SLAP! Pay attention; you will be graded.

Now: The thing to remember is that comic books are in actuality only worth what people are willing to pay for them. Repeat: Comic books are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. In actuality, this axiom applies to any product, even Johnson's Baby Powder or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes, but it's more ambiguous with the hobby-based merchandise.

After all, there ain't much tangible product in a comic. You can get more cheap paper by paying 35� for the 1"-thick Sunday Post than from an 8�x11", 26-page comic book, if it's paper you want, and staples are easy to come by in America. The only thing that raises prices -- dependent on character, art and plot -- is demand. So, although even a bowl of stew could be worth a bag of diamonds to the right starving man in the middle of a dry Sahara duststorm, it ain't worth a buck to those employees at Campbell's.

So maybe our parents didn't hold the future in their hands after all. Maybe that's just one of those common myths that enables people to claim some small piece of glory amid an otherwise mundane existence -- to say perhaps that they almost�20had it all and then lost it. Just maybe, it was their unfortunate but noble sacrifice that enabled a few lucky souls to make it big with the last remaining copies of a certain issue. (Lucky souls, most of them the perpetual packrats who added comics into their various collections of twine balls, tin cans, marbles, twisty tops, old newspapers, soda bottles, radio parts, springs, cotton balls, wheat pennies, popsicle sticks, and cereal lid flaps, Just Because. You have to wonder why Fate smiles on them.)

It is because of this misperception of the value of comics, this overwhelming nightmare greed to make nothing worth something for the sake of cold hard cash, that I firmly label the majority of America's current obsession with comics to be mostly a fad.

But don't worry. The majority'll catch on soon and bail out, once the new bandwagon drives by.