Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones

Author:Malcolm Jones [Jones, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37889-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

At home, I spent every morning with the funnies, and this was one routine that did not change when I went to stay with my father. The only difference was that they had different comic strips in South Carolina: Brenda Starr, Mandrake the Magician, Dondi. I didn’t care. Comics were comics, and in fact the Charlotte Observer—the paper taken by most people just over the state line in South Carolina—had double the number of comics we read in the Winston-Salem Journal. I wasn’t crazy about Brenda Starr—everyone had those weird pupil-less eyes (even weirder than Orphan Annie, although Annie was a favorite, odd eyes or not), and I missed Rip Kirby, a detective who wore glasses (like me) and smoked a pipe (like my dad). Even as a kid, I recognized that Alex Raymond, creator of Rip Kirby and before that Flash Gordon and Secret Agent X9, was the best artist I’d ever seen (although by the time I started reading Rip Kirby, Raymond was dead and the strip was drawn by John Prentice—the style, though, was the same: noir in 57 shades of black, each line inked precisely but with careless confidence). I copied a lot of comics and cartoons (I had my Mickey Mouse phase, my Li’l Abner period), but I knew better than to try to draw like Alex Raymond.

Narrative power, point of view, characterization, dialogue—the funnies were my introduction to the power these components had to cast a spell. I fell into them, dived into them, swam in them every day. I could spend the better part of an hour completely bewitched by the machinations of Evil Eye Fleagle or the way Augustus Mutt’s mustache curled like a wave away from his face. There was something hypnotic about even the badly drawn strips—what were those circles on Sam Ketchum’s face in Dick Tracy? Freckles? I never knew, though I pondered long and hard. And why did Mutt & Jeff take its title from Mutt’s last name and Jeff’s surname?

On the newspaper page facing the comics, most papers ran the word-jumble game, the crossword puzzle and the movie ads, and at some point I began getting lost in the pictures featured in those movie ads in the same way I’d gotten lost in the comics. Even as a pre-adolescent, I couldn’t stop looking at Mamie Van Doren writhing in the ad for Sex Kittens Go to College, even as I puzzled long and hard over the title, too. Six Kittens? What did they mean? And then Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip—more kittens! The better angels of my nature persuaded me to keep these questions to myself.

In the South in the late fifties and early sixties, there was a peculiar subgenre of movies that mostly played as part of a triple bill at the drive-in theaters. They featured country-and-western stars or actors who specialized in cornpone, such as Edgar Buchanan, and from what I could gather—never being allowed to see trash like that—they stitched threadbare plots around occasions for the stars to perform their hits.

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