Kona The Caveman and Me

I think I may have discovered why I'm such a strange little duck. I mean, truly bizarre. And proud of it, I might add. I've seen normality. It wasn't pretty.

But, also (and in this I'm serious) I worry a bit about the state of comic books. Or graphic novels. Or sequential art. Or call them what you will. They are, or were, the popular art and so important.

To explain…as you know, I'm moving. And, because I'm moving, I'm emptying out my house. Just about four times a week, now, I take another truckload of stuff to the dump. What I'm not throwing away, I'm donating to this or that charity. A still smaller percentage of my possessions I'm trying to sell on Ebay.

And among the things I'm trying to sell are scores and scores…hundreds!…of comic books, all that I bought or received in my misspent youth. My parents mailed them to me some years ago. I think for the amusement of watching me try to find a place to store them.

Anyway, as I go through the comics, almost all of which date from the early 1960s, I'm struck by how really weird they are.You'll recall I mentioned the series that had Mickey Mouse as a spy—a five-foot rodent who talks, somehow inserted into our world of humans, utterly out of place and yet no one seems to notice anything odd.

Well, as I've delved deeper into the piles, I've found more and more like that. More and more that's downright loopy.

For example, I've just put on Ebay three issues of "Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle," one from 1963 and two from 1964. (They are here)

Who's Kona? you ask. He is, I answer, a cave man. Specifically, Kona is a caveman who happens to look a lot like a movie star with long blond-white hair and who lives on an island that time forgot. It's the sort a spot where Neanderthals, dinosaurs, and giant apes live cheek by jowl.

Kona is the king of all this. Then, one day, a family of modern humans, the Dodds, crash their blimp on the island. That's right, a blimp. Long story as to what they were doing in a blimp and where they were going before they crashed. Suffice to say they do crash, Kona saves them, and thus begins a beautiful friendship. Kona abandons his island and he and the Dodds roam the world and have marvelous adventures.

According to Don Markstein's Toonpedia, Kona appeared when Dell publishing was in desperate need of new material when its former partner, Western Printing, set up its own line of comics, the famed Gold Key. In the process, it took with it all the titles and characters that had formerly been in Dell's stable. Kona was one of several characters to dash to Dell's rescue.

But I mention Kona because of the comics' art. It is surreal. I mean that it's surreal in the sense that the surrealists meant. The books are a succession of images…startling, alien, even hallucinogenic! It is hard to put into words just how alien they are, or how much they challenge one's normal perceptions of things.)

Thus, on Monster Isle, we have Neanderthals mounted on dinosaurs and firing rifles and Tommy guns. In the 1963 issue, Kona and friends discover the Pacificans, once humanoid but now equipped with the heads of fish or lizards—and with these strange creatures they do epic battle.

It is …it really is…a little like an acid trip. And not necessarily a good one—as demonstrated by the Pacificans, with their heads of beasts and their high-tech weapons.

And all this was my early reading matter. Is it any wonder I am myself so peculiar? The amazing thing is that I'm not even stranger than I am—maybe sprouting an animal head while riding on a dinosaur.

Okay…

Now comes the serious part. These comics date from the period when comic books were considered complete and total trash. There were no such things as well-respected "graphic novels." There were no professors using them in classes on postmodern literary theory. They were wholly without value…or so said the dominant culture.

Now, of course, all that's changed. Comics, or comix, have been legitimized. They have been integrated into haut culture. Works like Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, are quite rightly regarded as important pieces of art.

Which is all good.

And yet...

Sometimes I worry.

I am not sure you could do something like Kona, these days. Even if you could somehow scrape away the unconscious racism and sexism in the work, you might not be able to reproduce its vigor, its energy, its dream-like intensity. Those characteristics may not be valued any longer.

As I look at graphic novels (things Maus and Persepolis excepted) I'm troubled by how alike many of them are. They have a hero who faces some great challenge (Vampires, Zombies, whatever) but who spends more time wrestling with his or her own angst than with the villain. And it is angst of a very special sort—adolescent angst, or, at most, twenty-something malaise. Oh, now and then, the artist throws in Meaningful Social Issues…Feminism, gun control, Race-Class-Gender...but those are in the script as a backdrop. They are the setting before which the main character performs his or her endless soliloquy.

Which is, I think, a problem. I'm not sure how long an art form can last given so limited a repertoire. (Surely it is no surprise that comic book sales are down.)

But even if comics/comix survive, there is a deeper, more fundamental concern. I'm troubled by yet another thought.

What if the price of acceptance into haut culture is the loss of creativity?