Comics, Take Me Away!

When I was a little girl, we would go visit that house on Hill Street where my Great Grandparents lived and after enough time talking to them, we kids would slip upstairs, yes, these very stairs these crazy relatives are standing on, and take a right into a cozy little bedroom with a nice fluffy bed with pillows, and a dresser with a glass container full of marbles and peeries, and a nice sized box on the floor full of the most over-read comics on the planet.

Whew! was that a run-on sentence or what?I was partial to Archie and Richie Rich, though Tarzan and others were also found.A good portion of my time visiting at Grandma’s was spent relaxing on the bed with these old friends. I looked around for a picture of that room and couldn’t find one, but lo and behold my Grandfather had taken this photo of a young girl who looks like she fell asleep with Jughead on her mind.  And a double exposure at that! My Grandfather had just gotten himself a camera and was trying to learn how to take photo’s. Here, I spied the place beneath his own stairs where their stash-o-comics lay on the stereo. Funny how these things turn up.In looking thru his slides I came across one that was completely dark so no one knew what was on it: Thankyou Photoshop, for the ability to resurrect a photo lost decades ago. I can only assume that my Grandmother, who spent a few years in that house of her parents, might be reading a comic in this picture.

Ok, so it is probably a book about birds, but I bet she was once a young girl on that bed like myself, and wanted dearly to be able to read the words so she could understand what the comics were saying.

There was also a photo of an Aunt trying to hide from the camera behind a comic book, it was pretty cute, but I let it be.

In my memory also is a photo of my older sister and I as young kids visiting my grandparents Cabin on Lake Gogebic, reading comics on the couch. If I find that I will put it up here also.The reason my mind is on comics is that recently my daughter had a small disaster at her home and she had to go through three boxes of my old comics and re-preserve them in new plastic and cardboard and put them into watertight totes for safe-keeping. My Great Grandpa would be so happy looking down and viewing what happened that day, my daughters, daughters, learned the joy of reading comics.

OK one learned the joy of reading them, the kindergartner learned the lesson her grandmother learned:

In order to truely enjoy a comic, you need to learn to read first.

Thank you Grandpa for providing a fun impetus to read for generations to come!