Give Our Regards to Atomsmashers! By Jeet Heer National Post (July 24, 2004) Nostalgia is rooted in personal memory, so we tend to think of it as a quirky private emotions akin to homesickness or malaise. In point of fact, nostalgia is actually closer to being a communicable disease, a fast-spreading malady not unlike the flu. It is very easy to be infected by someone else’s nostalgia. Very few of us remember the radio dramas of the 1930s and 40s, yet watching Woody Allen’s Radio Days makes us share his loving memory of this lost art form. Even fewer of us are the children of Russian aristocrats, yet countless readers have been moved by Vladimir Nabokov’s reverie on the family estate he lost during the Russian Revolution. Why is it so easy to feel nostalgic even for things we have no actual experience of? Perhaps because we all feel powerless as we’re carried along by the relentless flow of events, we can quickly empathize with someone else’s desire to cling to childhood memories. Time is the one enemy all humanity has in common and each of us has a private Rosebud sled buried somewhere in the closet. The social force of nostalgia is so powerful that gazing backwards has become our dominant cultural style. We live in an age of cinematic remakes, retro music, historical novels, vintage clothing stores, and old industrial buildings re-fitted into condos. Sepia photographs, once relegated to dusty albums, now show up on the front page of newspapers. The infectious power of nostalgia explains the genuine (if fitful and limited) charm of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, a collection of seventeen essays on comics written by as many writers and edited by Sean Howe. As Howe notes in the introduction, comics are a fixture of childhood reading, so they make a perfect time capsules, a handy device for anyone who wants to excavate their own primordial memories. “Up to the age of twelve, for better or worse, my strongest memories had to do with comics,” Howe confesses. “This partially because (unlike a first crush or a family vacation) the memories of reading can be constantly reinforced and relived, easily and vividly. For the legions of aging readers, what else are superhero stories but perpetually running narrative machines – an endless supply of nostalgia.” Feeling that many other middle-aged souls share his strong memories, Howe recruited more than a dozen writers, mostly up-and-coming novelists, to compose essays on their favorite comics. In bringing together comics and literature, Howe has shrewdly positioned his book as part of a larger cultural shift. As many people have noticed, with the rise of the graphic novel, comics are becoming more literary (the New York Times Magazine recently rehearsed this familiar argument in a long article). Less often observed is the fact that in recent years literature has become more comic-booky. Seeking to energize their fiction with a pop cultural zip, many young writers have compose novels revolving around comic books themes: a very partial list would include Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (a Pulitzer-prize winning roman a clef on the history of superhero comics), Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (wherein The Fantastic Four provides comfort during a family crisis), Tom De Haven’s Durby Dugan trilogy (which uses comic strips as a funhouse mirror for 20th century history), and J. Robert Lennon’s The Funnies (sometimes described as The Dysfunctional Family Circus). Among the most highly praised of these comics-inflected novels is Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Not unexpectedly, Lethem has the best essays in Give our Regards to the Atomsmashers! With his novelistic gift for evoking a time and place, Lethem describes the changing dynamics of a friendship he had with two fellow Marvel Comics fans, Luke and Karl. “Luke was precocious, worldly, full of a satirical brilliance I didn’t always understand but pretended to, as I pretended to understand his frequent references to ‘Aunt Petunia’ and ‘the Negative Zone’ and ‘the Baxter Building’,” Lethem notes, in a deft portrayal of a teenage retro snob. By contrast, Karl was a more difficult customer. “Karl was precocious, secretive, and rebellious, full of intimations of fireworks and drugs and petty thievery that frightened and thrilled me. He was curious about sex, and unaware or uninterested in the early history of Marvel superheroes. For him Marvel began with the hip, outsiderish lone heroes of the seventies – Ghost Rider, Luke Cage, Warlock, Iron Fist.” Using his torn allegiance to Luke and Karl as a jumping off point, Lethem goes into a mesmerizing riff on a range of themes: the different ways that teenagers try to act adult, how friendship shapes taste, the cultural shift from stoic war hero versus the post-war hipster, how we inherit our parent’s nostalgia, and the tricks that memory plays on us. Lethem’s essay is so good it actually makes much of the rest of the book redundant. Rather foolishly, editor Howe allowed most of his writers to focus on superhero comics, thus giving us nearly a dozen variations on Lethem’s essay. The same themes repeatedly get sounded out again and again: staid DC comics versus the edgier Marvel books, Stan Lee as a charming huckster, the battles by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to win credit for their creations, and the appeal of superheroes to nerdy teenage boys. Sometimes even the wording of the essays is similar. Lethem refers to “the too-aptly titled Marvel’s Greatest Comics.” More than 200 pages later Andrew Hultkrans makes a similar point about “the telling (accurately?) titled Marvel’s Greatest Comics.” While there are eleven articles about superheroes (or cognate genres), other forms of comics receive only cursory treatment: one essay on European comics (Tintin), one on Classics Illustrated, one on a classic newspaper strip (Little Nemo), and three on contemporary alternative cartoonists (Chester Brown, Jim Woodring, Renee French and Chris Ware). After all the essays on superheroes, these brief forays come as a great relief. Luc Sante does a particularly good job in describing the inviting “clear line” style of Herge’s Tintin and Myla Goldberg eloquently celebrates the work of French and Ware. Still, despite these welcome journeys outside superhero-ville, this is a pretty slim slice of the comics world. Consider what is missing: beloved newspaper strips like Peanuts and For Better or Worse, humour books like Archie, Little Lulu and Uncle Scrooge (all of which have a vocal fan base), Japanese manga (hugely popular with teenagers right now), and autobiographical works like Maus or Persepolis (both of which were international bestsellers). Rather than have ten repetitious articles about superheroes, Howe could have sought out writers interested in the real diversity of the comics world. There is a boy’s club atmosphere to this book which is reinforced by the fact that there are only three female contributors, none of whom write on superheroes. Since most of the male contributors lovingly dwell on their youthful infatuation with power fantasies, the book as a whole gives off the unwholesome reek peculiar to a teenage boy’s bedroom. Even those who have an appetite for nostalgia will find that the fare offered by this book is blandly lacking in variety.