3 Cartoon

Mother was my comforter, invariably selfless, generous, loving, kind, gentle, playful, fun, tender, and sweet. As soon as I was able to hold a crayon, she taught me to color, to draw, later to read and to spell. Mother bought me coloring books, dozens of them, and sitting or lying on the floor beside me she coached me and instructed me to color.

Light, soft, always inside the lines.

Careful.

I loved comic books and I owned at least two hundred of them maybe more. In the beginning my mother bought them for me and then later when my father began giving me a small weekly allowance I bought them myself at Woolworth's or McClellan's, the local dime stores. I exchanged them with those of friends some of whom owned many more than I. Only ten cents each my early favorites were of Donald Duck and his cousin Gladstone Gander, who reminded me of Norman, my mother's brother, Donald's Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Mickey Mouse and Goofy, Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Wimpy, Olive Oil, and Bluto, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Mighty Mouse, the magpies Heckle and Jeckle, and later the teenagers Archie, Betty, and Veronica, Superboy and Lana Lang, and the superheroes Superman and Batman and their respective evil nemeses Lex Luthor and The Joker.

Kid stuff.

I read them again and again.

Just a few blocks up the street from my home lived Mike Overbey and his brother Sandy, two years older, who possessed by far the largest and most diverse collection of comic books in the neighborhood. From the first issue on, they owned every copy of Mad, the satiric comic book magazine to which I myself soon subscribed. On the floor of their bedroom I often sat for hours and read the comics of darker genres I didn't have at home, stories of crime and of combat in World War II and Korea. By 1953 Jack Barry and I were making detailed pencil drawings of Reds and GIs lying wounded and dead on battlefields and in foxholes or dying in armored tanks and personnel carriers, their arms thrown upward in their agony as bullets passed through their chests and heads in straight gray lines, the dot of the bullet at one end and the machine gun barrels of the fighter planes of the USSR or the USA at the other end up above in the white sky.

War.