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janradderTonight I went to see a lecture give by David Hajdu on his new book The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America. It was given at the University of Minnesota Children's Literature Research library in conjunction with a local Minneapolis resident who was donating his comic book collection of around 40,000 comics. David Hajdu was interesting to hear as he talked about comics in the late 40's and early 50's and burnings of those comics as well as legislation enacted to keep them from being distributed. He's not who I wanted to write about, though.
Before he spoke, the man who'd donated his collection spoke. Before the event I'd found out that he was some big shot Minneapolis attorney so right away my anti-rich hackles went up. He'd also had some big dinner with about seventy guests before the lecture and the library had reserved most of the seating in the lecture room for those guests. When I found out that he'd be talking I kind of rolled my eyes and thought, let's just hope that it's quick.
When he came up to the podium he started talking about why he was donating his collection and about what comic books meant to him. He described sharing comics with his friends as a kid, and then later as he grew up and went to college. He talked about reading comics to his three children and instilling a love of comics in them. He talked about reading comic books to his nearly four year old grandson who always asks for another story after they finish each issue. He talked about things that he loved about super heroes such as the Spider-man line about "with great power comes great responsibility" and started to choke up when he talked about Superman being a being of such incredible power that he could easily take whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it but instead, used his power to protect the people of earth, even giving up his life to do so because it is the morally right thing to do. Throughout the talk he choked up and listening to him talk, I got choked up as well. When he got to why he chose to donate his collection instead of breaking it into components and selling it off, he said that by giving it to the library (which will make the collection available for the public to read), perhaps one day his grandchildren's grandchildren could go there and read the same comics that had been read by generations past. In the end, he said, he could no more sell his comics than Batman could auction off his mementos in the Bat Cave or that Superman could put the contents of his Fortress of Solitude up on ebay.
Before he spoke, the man who'd donated his collection spoke. Before the event I'd found out that he was some big shot Minneapolis attorney so right away my anti-rich hackles went up. He'd also had some big dinner with about seventy guests before the lecture and the library had reserved most of the seating in the lecture room for those guests. When I found out that he'd be talking I kind of rolled my eyes and thought, let's just hope that it's quick.
When he came up to the podium he started talking about why he was donating his collection and about what comic books meant to him. He described sharing comics with his friends as a kid, and then later as he grew up and went to college. He talked about reading comics to his three children and instilling a love of comics in them. He talked about reading comic books to his nearly four year old grandson who always asks for another story after they finish each issue. He talked about things that he loved about super heroes such as the Spider-man line about "with great power comes great responsibility" and started to choke up when he talked about Superman being a being of such incredible power that he could easily take whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it but instead, used his power to protect the people of earth, even giving up his life to do so because it is the morally right thing to do. Throughout the talk he choked up and listening to him talk, I got choked up as well. When he got to why he chose to donate his collection instead of breaking it into components and selling it off, he said that by giving it to the library (which will make the collection available for the public to read), perhaps one day his grandchildren's grandchildren could go there and read the same comics that had been read by generations past. In the end, he said, he could no more sell his comics than Batman could auction off his mementos in the Bat Cave or that Superman could put the contents of his Fortress of Solitude up on ebay.
