Branching out in the comics reading - oddly

As has probably become clear so far - and as I hope I've admitted - I'm a pretty major Marvel fan. Not to the point of current collecting - I quit a little after I got married, and I couldn't find any copies of the death of Captain America on the shelves, so I took that as a hint - but to the point of expecting that everything should read and look like a Marvel comic.

Oh, sure, I've read other things, but mostly of the canon - Maus, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Bone. Noticeably, the only thing that could claim any possible continuity is Miller's TDKR, but it's mostly mythic and predictive, and it's not like anyone my age doesn't know the basics of Batman. (Vicki Vale's his one true pairing, right?)

But I have been reminded that there was more at work than Marvel at this time, and I've started to work on that. It's not as easy for DC, since their change in creator royalties in the mid-seventies plays havoc on any chance of a DVD compendium like Marvel's getting. (Still, I wouldn't mind if Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, Atom, and others like them were only printed up to that point...) I've started some investigations of MAD, and it's been interesting to see how much - and how little - it changed from the late 50s to the issues that I read as a lad in the 80s. (And our elementary school had a subscription! Of course, it's gone now...)

So here are the texts that I picked up this week at the library: Alison Behdel's Fun Home and Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. This is an odd pairing, to say the least, but they're a pretty interesting yin and yang of American comics.

I picked up McDuck mostly because of a note that I read in one of those "Bathroom Reader" books while I was in Vancouver last month. In a hard-hitting, completely bereft of annotation or citations article (shock!) on the realism of science in comic books, it noted that the classic McDuck comics of Carl Barks were pretty good on their science. (Oddly, Superman and the Flash had failing marks.)

Rosa's taken up the copious heritage of Duckburg and crafted a tale of McDuck's rise to the top of a vault of money. (I won't play with the made-up numbers for how much money, though.) So far, it's pretty good - I'm about 1/3 of the way through - and I can see why the Onion AV club put it on their list of good books that should get cinematic adaptations (it's number ten on the list). I'd never been a fan of funny animal books before, but Bone made me reconsider their possibilities. And I've never been a big fan of Disney, but I suppose that I've got to make some allowances from time to time.

What's really interesting about this serial story, though, is the ways in which it presents stock Horatio Alger-style storymaking without annoying me or putting me off of the character. Part of it's the whole way in which McDuck's money tells him how he made it - this dime from a shoeshine, that silver dollar from a riverboat adventure - but part of it's the realization that these comics are huge in Europe. (Bigger than David Hasselhoff, I hear.) I'll have to look up some of the scholarship that's been done on this stuff by readable Marxists - it could be interesting. (At the very least, it'd be interesting to use some pages of this for a high school assignment on ideologies - how would a communist read this page? A Lockean liberal?)

Fun Home, on the other hand, is a critically-lauded graphic novel memoir by a woman who examines her family's history, the circumstances of her sexuality, and literary themes while she tries to understand her parents. It may sound dreadful - depending on your tastes for comics - but coming from someone who didn't absolutely love the graphic novel Ghost World, it's absolutely spellbinding. There's not a lot here for research - other than the few times where she's buying MAD magazine - but there's a lot here for literary fun. In many ways, it reminds me of The Corrections. I wonder if this one'll get on Oprah's list?