Narrative Transformations:
Jonathan Lethem’s M en an d Cartoons
Comic Books and Geek Culture
For example, there was a sense that you belonged. There was
the certainty that there were always others who had
compassion for you, even when things were at their hardest.
—Rick Moody, The Diviners, 437
In Men o f Tomorrow, Gerald Jones posits that roots for the term “geek”
can be traced to the transformation of youth culture in the late 20s and early 30s,
and that the name comes from a form of “super fandom” that comic strips and
the early comic books engendered: a community of boys (and a few girls) who
grew up in a changing world where old values and assumptions no longer
dominated their belief systems. These kids grew up the products of the modem
middle class and were "the first generation to grown up with access to an
alternative universe provided by commercial entertainment”; they grew up
“understanding that the very nature of experience and perception could be
transformed by machines and artifice, rendering the ‘make-believe’ as palpable
and dignified as the ‘real’”; they grew up at a time where "movies, pulps, radio,
the phonograph, comic strips—all combined to give the new generation an
inexhaustible supply of emotional and imaginative experience that required no
participation in reality” (35-36).
This community, circulating around others who encouraged “keeping
one’s core in that other world even when school or work demanded the presence
of one’s outer self,” allowed young people who shared similar backgrounds, life
stories, anxieties, or fears, to join together and to create subcultures within this
main culture. These subcultures "fine-tuned” their identities—“an indifference
to clothes and appearance, a manic but unsentimental bonhomie in thenmeetings, an amused distain for those who didn’t understand them. There was
no word for it yet,” stated Jones, “but now we can see this as the birth of geek
culture—comic, computers, video games, collectible figurines—has either
grown directly or taken much of its forms” (37).1
The stories and adventures captured in comic books spoke to hundreds
of thousands of kids who bought and discarded them as quickly as they read
them. Comics are a readable, tradable, disposable art form that had been created
for easy consumption and profit by the magazine publishing companies in the 30
and 40s.2 Geoffrey O’Brien argues that comics can be "absorbed without effort”;
in effect, a comic book is a "book capable of reading itself.. . . A comic offered
instant gratification of a longing for quick answers, passwords, shortcuts. It
dismantled the narrative that the kids didn’t want—the narrative that was