When I was young, during my Elementary School and Junior High years, I was struggling with reading. It was recommended to my parents that I should take further classes and have special tutors. One such tutor was in an after-school period on campus, while another one was off campus at a place called “The Reading Game.” These tutors helped me, but there was other help that I received that would improve my education.
It was during this period of time I first discovered comic books, as mentioned in my previous post, and I was regularly reading them… and I was reading them not just looking at the artwork (and I’ll tell you about the artwork and artists in a later post).
One day when my parents are having a ‘parent/teacher’ meeting with my special reading tutor to talk about how I was doing. They brought up the fact that I was reading comics, and asked if this was a good thing or should they take the comics away to have me read “real” books.
The response from the teacher was basically: “If he’s reading comic books, then he’s reading. Don’t stop him from reading.”
So, with God’s Blessing (see last post), and that of my teachers, comic books would not be denied me.
If I had been reading Marvel Comics, I might also have learned ‘big words’ from Stan Lee’s scripts like Excelsior, but I was a DC kid.
Because of one particular comic book series I would also be learning History and Research – All-Star Squadron.
As stated previously, my introduction to comic books also introduced me to the parallel world of “Earth 2”, so that not only did I already know the Justice League, I also discovered the Justice Society which was originally formed in 1940, first published in All-Star Comics #3. After the Blue-Ribbon Digest that I had read, the next Earth 2 story I picked up was All-Star Squadron #5 though current in publication it was taking place in 1942. Because of that, I first imagined that Earth 2 existed only in the 1940s. Though in no time I would discover “present day” Justice Society and other Earth 2 stories, but I absolutely loved reading stories about super heroes during World War 2. This would relate to how I was also enjoying radio programs from the same time period.
Roy Thomas was the writer of All-Star Squadron (and its modern-day child Infinity Inc, about the children of those original heroes), and he tried to include every Golden-Age Super Hero that DC Comics had the rights to, as they had bought properties from many of the other original publishers that no longer existed. As a former history teacher in his other life Thomas brought that into these stories. Yes, it was about super heroes fighting super villains, but he incorporated actual history into these stories. The story in All-Star Squadron began soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor and continue on. In many of the early issues the heroes met with President Roosevelt and even Prime Minister Churchill. In another reprint digest, I would learn that FDR himself brought the first heroes together as the Justice Society of America. Thomas also didn’t shy away from Executive Order 9066 in which Japanese Americans were sent to Internment Camps during the war, he wrote a story around it and the consequences of it.
Not only did I learn more about history, both in the war and on the home-front of the 1940s, through these comics than I may have in class, I also learned some of Roosevelt’s speeches and I presented one of them in a High School speech class because of the comics.
Because of the All-Star Squadron comics, I also learned to enjoy doing research. I would come to love spending time in libraries at microfilm machines, reading through old newspapers and magazines. This was part of history, but I always wanted to learn about the little events as well as the big. When I later joined the newspaper at my community college, I would use my research abilities to do articles about the history of the college itself.
I would go on to take classes in writing and art as my major, I know that my education began in the four colors pages of a comic book.
This is a continuing series on comic books as part of an assignment for Toastmasters which will result in a speech on the top of these blogs.
