It's October, and right now, somewhere in my head the Silver Shamrock company song is playing, on and on and on. The weather is cooler, and when I get up in the morning, the earth and the sky are still cloaked in glorious darkness.
(Why does that last one make me happy? I suspect it has something to do with my insomnia. Dragging myself out of bed only to find that the sun, and therefor the rest of the word, is already hard at work just gets under my skin. The night is mine, so quit stealing it, you over-sized Hindenburg)
I've recently been taking advantage of the fact that someone at Amazon was clever enough to realize that a lot of people would pay money to read all the full-sized horror comics that used to exist in my younger days. Creepy, Eerie, and all the rest always had a special magic that no one else seemed able to replicate. Maybe they seemed a little wilder, or more disgusting. Probably both, and probably due to the fact that they never sported the fashionable little seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority. Now that I'm a bit older and know a little more about the kind of insane, paranoid claims people used to (and still do) make about the effect of this kind of stuff, they seem even better.
That's good. Because, to put it kindly, now that I'm using grown-up eyes to look at them, these charming tokens of yesterday have a few, well, warts. There's a lot of repetition of the same basic themes, and oh lord but some of these stories are dumb. Also, and there's enough plagiarism in these titles to nominate them for an award. But did my naive younger self know that? Oh hell no. Wow, this guy rebuilt his ancestral home, only to find it infested with a swam of cursed, hungry rats? Why can't the people who write print books come up with stuff this good?
But at the same time, these stories never seemed to take themselves seriously. All the groan-inducing one-liners and semi-homophones that we now associate only with our favorite Cryptkeeper? Liberally sprinkled through every introduction. Plus, there's something about the hosts that have the feel if not a bit of the look of another less-scary comic-book character, Alfred E. Neuman. Can a character be creepy but not scary? Maybe. Maybe that's what they were going for. If so it might support a thought I have to explain some of those comics' appeal.
The special recipe that made up Creepy and its ilk is different from 'mainstream' horror comics, (yeah, I know there's no such thing) but it achieves something that's a little more subtle than you would expect. List out the essential ingredients, like the all-visual format, lack of adult themes, generous dose of humor, and simple, almost clownish narrators that speak directly to the readers. That almost sounds like it's designed for a child, doesn't it? The next step up from Richard Scary is Uncle Creepy? Given the fact that when these stories came out, a lot of the target audience was in the 12-15 year age range, that fits.
Now these stories do the same thing, maybe to a greater or lesser degree, that 'grown-up' tales do. They give us something to believe in. Murder your wife and stuff her body up the chimney? The maid will light a fire which will build up heat and pressure, and your wife will blast out the chimney like a bullet from a barrel and then she'll land on top of you, just as you were outside at the front gate, explaining to the sheriff that you have no idea where she is. Use hypnosis or special effects to convince your business partner that their dead child wants them to sell the company to you, cheap, and retire? Don't worry. That person will find some way to sell the whole thing so that you can retire, too. You've been such a good friend, after all.
Remember that I'm an atheist. These stories rarely if ever drop the literal god out of a machine, unless it's a little known protector god of a forgotten tribe or village, and even then that divinity almost never speaks. We see the business end of religion, delivered like a fastball to the face. We see results without needing to hear the dogma.
This gives us something important. Justice. Simple justice, delivered on time every time. Oh yes, we get irony too. But it and the good-person-triumphs-in-the-end trope that we sometimes see has a vector, a purpose that we can understand. The unwritten message is blunt, and reassuring. Maybe the universe doesn't care what happens to us, but maybe there's some mechanism to balance it. Hurt, and you'll be hurt. Take advantage, and you'll be taken. The cosmic rule of get what you give.
Now remember the age range that I said I thought these books were targeted towards?
How well do you remember your life from those years? Were you happy? Loved? Were you one of those weirdos who looked forward to going to school?
Did you feel powerful?
How secure was your fresh, ten-year-old world? When did you first have a family member or a beloved pet die? No one is dealt the same starting hand of cards as anyone else, but I'll bet if we all policebox-hopped back a few decades and one by one splashed a dash of vertaserum to all of our younger selves and asked, 'do you think you're safe?' then the nays would be in the majority. Life cannot be consistently kind, and some kids learn that lesson early. Bad things happen, really bad things. An adult can fight, or buy something to help protect against those bad things. What can a child do? Yes in theory the parents have the job to protect, but let's be honest here. You learned the adults in your life had limits on what they could do before they ever admitted it to you, didn't you? Seeing them every day, relying in them for food and shelter, you took special notice of their flaws and failings. Oh but don't you dare discuss it openly. Keep it secret, and forget that you ever saw it. If you pretend the danger isn't there, then it won't hurt you, right?
Wouldn't it have been nice to have a little reassurance, delivered in a humorous format, that you're not alone in this big, scary world?
This idea could be reaching, certainly. The stories in these old comic books were fun to read, and that was reason enough for kids to buy them. In most cases a cigar is just a cigar. But I do think there's truth in this thought. You and I are members of a species that rarely, if ever, has only one thing to say about any particular topic, and often the best lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.
I'm looking at the short story market once again. An idea that was born during that hard freeze of nearly a year ago is still kicking around, and I still have other stories that haven't been published yet. Oh and I haven't forgotten my novels.
Am I still writing? Yes. Still writing.
