On Comics and Grief

By Dale Jacobs

Fragmented and hybrid in style, On Comics and Grief examines a year in comic book publishing and the author’s grief surrounding his mother’s death. This book connects grief, memory, nostalgia, personal history, theory, and multiple lines of comics studies inquiry in relation to the comic books of 1976.

Structured around a year of comic books with a cover date of 1976, the year the author turned ten, the book is divided into an Introduction plus twelve sections, each a month of the publishing year. Two comic books are highlighted each month and examined through the interwoven lenses of creative nonfiction and comics studies. Through these twenty-four comics, the book addresses the major comic book publishers and virtually all genres of comics published in 1976.

By pushing the ways in which the personal is used in comics studies, combining different modes of writing, and embracing a fragmentary style, the book explores what is possible in academic writing in general and comics studies in particular. On Comics and Grief both acts as a way for the author to process his grief and uses grief as a way to think about the comics themselves through the emotions and personal connections that underlie the work we do as scholars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781771126069

Dale Jacobs

Dale Jacobs is professor of English at University of Windsor. He is author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy and editor of The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change. His essays on comics have appeared in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, English Journal, College Composition and Communication, Journal of Comics and Culture, and Studies in Comics.

Book preview

JANUARY

Marvel Team-Up #41

Casper Halloween Trick or Treat #1

What is grief if not love persevering?

~WANDAVISION, Episode 8

Consequently, the creation of action in a comic is an intricate and continuous negotiation and (re)consideration of various panels at the same time …

~BARBARA POSTEMA, Narrative Structure in Comics:

Making Sense of Fragments

THE PROGRAM FOR MOM’S FUNERAL SITS ON THE LEFT-hand side of my desk. In Loving Memory of Melvina Jacobs, 1922–2013. In the photo above those words, Mom sits in a garden, smiling, gazing to her right. She is, as always, smartly dressed, in a sky-blue blazer, one of her many brooches on her left lapel. There is no date on the photograph, but it must have been taken just a few years before she died, likely a memento of one of Mom’s trips to see my sister Faye on Vancouver Island. The only word of the inside text I can see is the word Eulogy at the top of the second interior page. I know without looking that underneath that word is the name of Faye’s husband, Leo, who stepped in when neither I nor my sisters felt able to face a congregation of mourners, much less talk about Mom and her life. When she died, I carried on with the work that was expected of me by reading those page proofs and answering emails that didn’t finally matter at all, but I could not pay tribute to Mom at her funeral. I felt too battered by her death, too raw from the hours at the hospital. I couldn’t start writing her eulogy until I started writing this book.

If the dead are not in time or not in our sort of time, is there any clear difference between was and is and will be?

~C.S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed

As I walk in the door of our house, the frigid December cold trailing behind me, I can smell mashed potatoes cooling on the stove, waiting to be mixed into dough for the Christmas lefse. I take off my coat and boots, walk to the table in the dining room and the stack of comics that awaits me there. Mom is busy in the kitchen gathering the ingredients—potatoes, lard, flour, eggs, cream, salt. She removes the large mixing bowl from its place in the cupboard, transfers the cooled mashed potatoes into the bowl. She then adds the lard, salt, egg, and cream. I can’t see the result, but I know from helping her last year that she’ll know it’s ready when the mixture is yellowish white and moist to the touch. She reserves the flour until the end so that she can gauge the moisture of the dough as she adds the last dry ingredient a bit at a time. Once the dough is the right consistency, she spreads flour on the countertop, rubs some into her hands, ready to roll out the lefse.

Though I can’t be certain of the exact comic book I was reading in this memory from Christmas of 1975, there’s an excellent chance that it was either Marvel Team-Up #41 or #42, cover dated January 1976 and February 1976, respectively. Marvel Team-Up #41 would have been on the shelf in October 1975, with Marvel Team-Up #42 coming sometime in November. These two comics featured Spider-Man travelling back in time to the Salem Witch trials where he teamed up with Scarlet Witch and Vision to fight Cotton Mather and the Dark Rider. I was thoroughly enthralled with this continuing story, using our small library to find out what I could about the real Salem Witch trials as I eagerly awaited the next instalment. What I uncovered was scant, just enough to understand the unfairness of the persecution. Not enough to see the underlying patterns of misogyny that I came to understand as I encountered the history of the witch trials at later times and through different texts.

Still, it was, I think, my first realization that comics could represent history, even if in only the most fantastical way. Spider-Man, Scarlet Witch, and Vision had been thrust into history, into the kind of suspicion and danger that I couldn’t imagine, ensconced as I was in my warm house, Mom in the next room making preparations for Christmas. Of course, I couldn’t see then that it wasn’t just the remove that I experienced in terms of history that kept me safe. It was simply the fact that I was male, a privileged position that I didn’t understand at the time, even as I watched Mom labour over the food we would eat for Christmas dinner. It would be years before I understood the nascent exploration of gender dynamics buried in that fantastical representation of history, but that formative move in my engagement with comics cannot be separated from memories of Mom and the circumstances and memories of reading.

She cups the first ball of dough in the palm of her hand, sets it on the floured counter, flattens it with the heel of her hand, and begins to shape it into a thin circle with the grooves of the rolling pin, pausing her rolling to check if the griddle is hot enough. When she’s satisfied that it is, she gingerly slides her thin wooden stick under the carefully rolled circle of potato dough, the rolling pin’s impressions still evident on its surface. I see that stick, think of the story that Mom always tells about Dad sitting at the kitchen table one night when they were first married, carving a slat off an old binder canvas, turning the wood this way and that, shaping and smoothing until it was a perfect fit for her hand.

Careful not to tear the dough, she gently places one half circle of lefse on the hot griddle and proceeds to unfurl it by rolling her stick to the right so that the whole circle is spread out on the surface of the pan. As the first piece cooks, she begins to roll out another, the grooves of the rolling pin again applied to a small handful of dough. When she finishes her rolling, she moves again to the griddle, a practiced timing as she moves through each step of her task. The lefse has just begun to blister, brown spots rising from the surface of the circle, the edges just beginning a slight upward curl. It is time to turn it over. Mom takes her stick, inserts the tapered end under the centre of the lefse, and again begins the process of turning a half circle into a circle, the other side now pressed against the hot surface. A minute more and it will be done, ready to cool under a dishcloth, fresh for Christmas Eve supper tonight.

[C]omics are not simply static objects that can be considered from an atemporal perspective. They change and are changed over time, modifying the space they occupy as they are being read.

~IAN HAGUE, Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels

For me, the act of reading comic books as a child is bound up with images of my mother, the smells of her cooking, the sight of Dad working in the garage or reading in his chair, the sounds of my parents moving around the house. My reading of those comic books in December 1975 was modified by the smell of lefse in the air, by the bustle of Mom’s activity in the kitchen, by the warmth of that room, and by the sense of security that those sensations created, just as the comic books I was reading modified my perception of the scene around me, the storyline of superheroes at the Salem Witch trials providing a stark contrast to the quiet and secure life I was experiencing. As I read through the material from the comics from 1976, some comic books—such as Marvel Team-Up—have particular associations and memories attached, like the extended scene above and its evocation of specific senses.

Reading those comic books enacts for me a nostalgia for a happy, secure time in my childhood. That recreation of memory, unfolding as it does in fragments that evoke the comics form itself, not only helps me to process the grief I still feel at the loss of my mother, but helps me to more concretely understand how comics put the present and the past in conversation with each through the material act of reading. As I begin to think about larger theoretical issues, such as Hague’s ideas about the relationship between comics and the senses and the multiple ways that history is used in various genres of comics, I am also processing my grief through the tool of nostalgia.

Mom is, as always, driving, Dad in the passenger seat and me in the back of our new Ford LTD, butter yellow with a vinyl roof I can’t help but touch every time I get in. A few years later, when I am just beginning to drive, I will imagine that the seemingly infinite front end is the nose of a starfighter of which I am the pilot. But right now I am lounging across the enormous back seat, staring at the clouds through the back window. I glance occasionally at Mom, tall in the seat, her greying hair in a tight perm that frames her angular face. Dad looks out the window at fields dotted with snow. It’s late November and there are no crops to discuss, no speculation about how the wheat is coming up or how the harvest is proceeding. It’s not even five years since we left the farm, moved into Amisk, to the house they had built a few blocks up from the highway. Their retirement house. Not that either of them wanted to retire, but Dad’s failing eyesight gave them little choice. That’s why Mom is, as ever, driving, as we make our way past the turnoff to our old farm, bound for Wainwright, a town of about five thousand, forty miles to the north.

[P]eople associate nostalgia with memories and the past, and that the memories are all fond ones. Underneath this surface understanding, nostalgia generally provokes a certain sense of happiness, but for almost everyone it is strongly tinted with a sense of longing or loss.

~DAVID BERRY, On Nostalgia

It’s May 4, 2021 and I am at my desk in my home office, reading back through what I wrote yesterday about driving to Wainwright with my parents. I spent longer that I should have searching the internet for photographs of their car, sure that I needed to have evidence of that particular model and colour before I could start writing. As I searched, I thought back to all the nights in front of this same computer in this same office, trolling through eBay in search of comic books from 1976. Searching for objects that would connect me to my childhood. To Mom. Unlike the comic books that I have gathered around me like talismans, I know that I will almost certainly never encounter a physical version of that car again. But I still needed proof that it existed, that I had not dreamt it or all those drives with my parents, Mom at the wheel and Dad in the passenger seat. That photo, tucked as it is now on to the desktop of my computer, helps me to excavate all of those happy memories, but that pull of nostalgia is always tinged with the loss of my parents. In the days and months immediately following Mom’s death, I could not bear to take myself back to those moments, but as time went on, it was exactly those moments of the everyday I shared with her that I needed to embrace. Moments seemingly embedded in objects like comics and photographs of things like that butter yellow LTD.

I really loved comics … [and] I’d have to say that I probably loved comics so much, like I did, because my parents didn’t give a damn about them. I went to the newsstand every day looking for new ones, and if they weren’t there, I would stare at the old ones again, every day, like I would find something new [in them]. My buddies and me talked about them all day. If you didn’t know about comics, you were a nobody.

~MARTIN THALL, as quoted in David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague

In Wainwright, there were two large grocery stores, a department store, two hardware stores, both men’s and women’s clothing stores, a fabric store, a small bookstore, several restaurants, and a movie theatre. More importantly from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy, there were two drugstores, both of which carried comic books. It was 1976 and my dollar would buy me three comics, leaving me a dime for candy later in the week.

The comic books were nestled in the back of the store between the magazines and the paperback westerns and romances. I scanned the selection, giving them a quick once over before I began to make my decisions. Among the brightly colored covers were familiar titles like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Superman, Detective Comics (starring Batman), Archie, and Casper the Friendly Ghost, which I, at ten, had recently deemed a little kids’ comic. (Archie was still acceptable because it was about the world of teenagers which, at ten, fascinated me.) I had read and even purchased all of these titles since I began reading comics a few years before, their words and images blending together to tell the stories in which I immersed myself.

~DALE JACOBS, Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy

Even before Mom died, I was envisioning that drugstore, thinking about the ways the comic books were nestled between the romances and westerns, which, I now realize, were the genres Mom and Dad read and that I saw around our house every day. Even though they had both left school to work on their respective farms at the end of eighth grade, they both valued reading and education. And while they may not have read or cared about comics, they at least passively supported my reading of them, always allowing me an hour to walk around downtown, more than enough time to leisurely peruse the comics on offer that week, before I had to meet them at the Co-op where they would be buying groceries. Whether out of ambivalence or trust, they never inspected what I bought, never questioned the time I spent reading those comic