Comic relief: what began in 1938 as an unassuming 13-page book about a hero named Superman has evolved into a mix of art and literature

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 11, 2002 | by Julia Duin

Seated at a restaurant table, Nate Baxter arranges stacks of brightly colored comic books by nationality: India, Hungary, France, Thailand, Germany, Malaysia, Japan and Croatia. A passing waitress comes to a quick stop, her widening eyes scanning the colorful spreads: One cover features Mindy, a zoologist surrounded by elephants, alligators and monkeys; another shows a Canadian Indian using his lassoing abilities to save an endangered boat; and a third presents red-caped Chinese superhero Mark Chen.

"Comics are the most widely read literature in the world," says Baxter, a New Mexico cartoonist and founder of Rox35 Media Inc. "Every time the Chinese government wants to reach their people, they use comics. Mao used comics to propagandize in the 1940s. When they wanted to discredit the Falun Gong, they used comics. Now they have a comic-book character, Soccer Boy, who combats Western influences and promotes Patriotism."

The United States alone has 375 new comic-book titles a month, according to the New York City Comic Book Museum. An estimated 3,500 comic-book shops nationwide generate annual sales of $260 million. The average cost is $2.60; the average reader age is 24 (95 percent of all comic-book readers are male).

Yet interest in the states is puny compared with Japan, where an entire populace consumes the art form. "Whereas we produced hundreds of thousands of comics in this country, Japan publishes millions," says David Gabriel, executive director for the Comic Book Museum. "They use them for everything: teaching, subway reading, you name it."

Baxter uses comics for missionary purposes -- the only way to reach the Christianity-resistant Japanese. He travels the world training foreign artists how to preach the Gospel through comic-book art and word balloons in their own languages.

"A lot of churchgoers say the medium is not worth the message, that people won't take a comic-book Gospel seriously," says Baxter. "They also say comics are used for pornography and the occult, so we can't use them. But how about movies? They get used for pornographic and occult purposes, too, yet we make the `Jesus film,'" referring to a popular movie filmed by Campus Crusade for Christ. "Even airline-safety brochures use cartoons to communicate life-and-death information. I tell people in the church we have the most important life-and-death information possible. Why don't we use comics to spread that?"

Japan probably has more foreign missionaries per capita than any other Asian country, but the lowest rate of return, notes Baxter, holding up a popular inch-thick Japanese comic called Shownen (meaning young boy). "The idea is to reach people with what they are already reading rather than reinventing the wheel. Forty percent of all printed material in Japan is comics."

Comic books started out as an American art form, rapidly gaining popularity during World War II when soldiers took them overseas. "At first, comics were superhero genre and escapist fantasy," says Lee Dawson of Dark Horse Comics, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based publisher. "Then came romance and Westerns, but the superhero genre still dominates. It's a populist medium. Words and images together have a much more resounding impact."

Readership is dwindling in the United States, however, and the number of mom-and-pop comic shops is dwindling. "The reason is competition," Dawson says. "Kids don't want to spend money and go to the shop when they could be on the Internet, renting videos or watching TV. Comic books are $2.50 to $3.50 for 22 pages. When the Batman movie came out, there was a huge surge in popularity. The new Spiderman movie, which comes out this summer, has the potential to spike interest in comics again." The long-term industry trend, reports Dawson, is toward "graphic novels," or book-length comics, ideal for J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Rings and the book-movie combos such as Left Behind.

Real events are transformed into comic-book art as well, as evidenced by "Heroes Among Us: A Comic Book Art Exhibit in Celebration of the Heroes of 9/11," a recent show at the New York City Fire Museum in the Soho district. The exhibit featured 100 panels, including artist Igor Kordey's depiction of the frenzied last minutes of doomed United Airlines Flight 93. Other panels depicted superheroes such as the Incredible Hulk rescuing people. One titled "If Only" had Superman flying over a ruined World Trade Center.

"When people just hear the words `comic book,' you think of an Archie comic you read as a kid," says Gabriel. "Someone once said that comic books are the closest art form to the fountain of youth because it brings you back to how you felt back then."