By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel Staff
The pandemic forced me to do something I had put off for years: start reading a prized collection of comics.
Frankly, I need the relief. I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t right now.
There is a popular piece of advice nowadays: “Don’t postpone joy.”
Well, I’ve postponed it.
For someone who writes thousands of words a week, edits ten times as many and is reading news articles from first thing in the morning until bedtime, I have found time for books, but those are a different escape. I like to be buried in an “Easy” Rollins mystery by Walter Mosley, a sci-fi short story collection or classic by Octavia E. Butler or William Gibson, or something by my latest favorite author, Haruki Murakami.
But the books are not the joy I was postponing. That is something that grew from my love of the funny pages in newspapers.
I always looked forward to the color comics in the Sunday newspapers. My maternal grandmother would buy two Sunday newspapers, The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She was a voracious reader, but what I cherish is the picture of her sitting on the rug in her formal dining room, the newspapers spread around her, laughing out loud as she read the Sunday comics.
I loved the funny pages. I loved them as a kid and when I got into the newspaper business in the early 1980s. At the newspapers where I worked, I could cheat by sneaking into the composition department where they would physically assemble the newspapers. The syndicates sent a week’s worth of each comic strip at a time, meaning I could peek at my favorite comic strips before they ever made it into print.
I also became an advocate with my then-publisher with two new comics that were spreading across the country. The second was Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. The first, The Far Side by Gary Larson.
My publisher didn’t get why either one was interesting or funny. I lobbied hard to do readers a service … at least readers who shared my love of an insufferable maniac of a kid and his stuffed tiger who came to life in his imagination and for Larson’s being able to see life from the perspective of an insect or an animal. Talk about anthropomorphizing.
Both comics became wildly popular in the 1980s, and both ended in the mid 1990s.
And then, something amazing happened. The comics were collected into big, expensive hardcover collections. In 2003, Larson published The Complete Far Side, a set of two-hardcover books in their own slipcase decorated with his cartoons. It has more than 4,000 of his single-panel cartoons from 1980 to 1994, start to finish, and more than a thousand that were never in a collection. I bought it years ago, but never opened it.
I didn’t want to start it because I didn’t want to finish it.
Flash forward to 2020 and after two weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic news and restrictions, I could not postpone that joy any longer.
Every night, just before I go to bed, I try not to dislocate my shoulder as I pull one of the big heavy volumes out of the case. I open it and read a few pages, closely studying each of the four single-panel cartoons per page, and laughing like my grandmother did when she read the funnies. I limit myself because I want to stretch this joy as long as I can, but I read long enough until the laughter makes me forget the news of the day.
At this rate, it is going to take me a while – I hope longer than the pandemic restrictions – to finish this collection. In a way, I’m already sad that I know the endpoint.
On the bright side, as soon as I finish, I have The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection waiting, still shrink-wrapped and safe, under my nightstand.
David Nahan is editor and publisher of the Ocean City Sentinel, Cape May Star and Wave, Upper Township Sentinel and The Sentinel of Somers Point, Linwood and Northfield.