Comic Books and Graphical Novels

I was never really a big fan of comic books, with one exception: Back in the 1950's and early 60's, I couldn't get my hands on enough comic books about World War II Navy battles. Nowadays you hear only about the superhero comics, and I'm sure I read a lot of Superman. But you may be surprised to hear there was another genre, a group of comics that provided spine-tingling stories about American submarines evading Japanese depth charges, then firing off their torpedoes when the Japanese thought they were home-free. They were called "Japs," though, not "Japanese."

I can think of three reasons for my Navy battle fixation: one, World War II was fairly recently over when I was born, but was still fresh in the mind of everyone who lived through it; two, my eldest brother, who hadn't lived at home since I was four, was a Naval officer and my hero; and third, there was an enormous picture of the USS Enterprise hanging on the wall in the bedroom I shared with my two other brothers. It looked something like this one:


I was going to join the Navy myself. Every week the family would watch a program called "Men of Annapolis" on television, a show that told stories about the lives of midshipmen. (There was another, vastly inferior, program about West Point, too.) I wouldn't miss an Army-Navy game; Navy pummeled Army with regularity in those days. (They had a pretty good quarterback named Staubach. Don't know whatever became of him.) And I read and re-read a book about life at Annapolis. Here's my main takeaway from that:

"How's the cow?"

"Sir, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk. The lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the nth degree."

I decided I'd better memorize that in case an upperclassman ever asked me if there was any milk left at the dinner table, where I would be seated on the front three inches of my chair. Fifty years later, I'm still prepared.

Then Vietnam.

But this is a post about comic books, and I left them in the 50's, I'm sure. Like most people who grow up.

While I wasn't paying any attention to them, comic books became something else: they became graphic novels. I've only read one graphic novel, something called Maus: A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History, and I'd say it adds enough gravitas to the genre that nobody needs to feel apologetic about being a graphic novelist. If you haven't read it, you should.

So, that's where things stood until this morning, when I saw this review in the NY Times of a comic book series called Unknown Soldier which is being collected into a book. Unknown Soldier is a comic book about – are you ready for this? – the civil war in Uganda.

Perhaps because I know this can be done well (Maus), or because I got to talk to a bunch of wonderful children from Uganda recently, I'm looking forward to reading it. I think it's going to be a far cry from my Navy comics, though.