Little Bens ring out the tales of comic contraband

Gaston de Rosayro

My old school, St. Ben’s is an educational institution where the religious and academic combine. Legend has it that St.Benedict was a successful exorcist who sent the Devil sprinting back like the blazes to his hot-seat in Hades. You see, many of the Bens grew up in very religious Catholic families around the shadow of the largest cathedral in the island. All the citizens of Kotahena lived by the Bells of St Lucy.

Lucy’s name means ‘light,’with the same root as ‘lucid’ which means ‘clear, radiant, understandable.’Yet although under the mantle of two great canonised icons many of the students appeared to be the very epitome of some devilish spawn. Yes, a hell of a lot of them decided to embrace the dark side and give the Devil his due. And the good La Sallian Brothers seemed, well, hell bent on setting us on the straight and narrow path.

One way of doing it was to beat the living daylights out of us. It did work to a certain degree. One inflexible rule was that comic books were considered contraband in school. In those days, there were many comic books that had hyper-muscled dudes in tight-fitting duds beating each other up. Superheroes reigned supreme on the bookshop stands.

In those halcyon days there were comics of every conceivable genre. Horror, Western, war stories. All shared top billing with the guys in capes or two-gun toting cowboys wearing ten gallon stetsons. Perhaps most surprising to our jaded, modern sensibilities, romance comics were also really popular.

Aimed at teenage girls, thousands of romance titles flew from the shelves and into the hands of a generation looking for true love. But they were comic books and had a little bit of comedy and romance. Harmless crushes really. Although the religious gurus of both St. Ben’s and the Shepherdian Convent next door thought they were over-passionate reading for youthful, impressionable minds.

But what the heck. Many of us had a devil may care attitude towards such restrictive rules. The boys actually seemed almost drawn to books like this. Sometimes I think the best way to get kids reading is to tell them they cannot read certain books or styles. Now many of the Bens had a strange inclination to cheer for the devil in movies and books, and just enough guilt about it to give themselves a jolt of pleasure. So, of course, a book about someone growing horns and slowly transforming into a devil was right down our alley.

The religious Brothers were no doubt aware that teenage boys were wild about girls. They thought that when their hormones kick in at puberty, they can think of nothing else, and that is the way it has always been. Right? Possible! But how would they have known anyway unless they had experienced such hormonal changes themselves? So we were taught, no brainwashed actually, that that only sissies liked girls. Masculine, red-blooded, all-Benedictine boys were supposed to ignore girls until they were of marriageable age.

One excuse of getting close to the girls of the neighbouring convent was to quietly slip them copies of teen and romance comics. Teen comics, such as Archie, tended to project youth, primarily interested in having good, clean teenage fun. We were introduced to a whole new American culture such as going to dances and on appropriate dates. The entire Archie, Betty, Veronica triangle was a good example of the genre and the unrequited love, played out for humorous effect that tended to predominate. But local culture being local culture, hardly anyone was allowed to date in that conservative almost puritanical Victorian era.

Trivial or frivolous is a favourite insult administered by certain highbrow scholars for the type of reading mentioned. But even they became interested in their subject in the first place because they were attracted by something gleaming, flashy and - yes, trivial. People should not look down on comics as they are just as good for children as conventional primers.

Many of us still believe that we have benefitted immensely from comics in the same way we have from reading other types of literature, despite some people often being snooty about them.

Most of my peers say that reading comics is actually a ‘simplified version’ of reading that does not have the complexity of real books with their dense columns of words and lack of pictures. But reading any work successfully, including comics, requires more than just absorbing text.

We Bens have found that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from progressing to reading other kinds of books. Comic books are actually good for young children! We ourselves could be living proof of this, having read sheaves of quality comic books as a child from publishers such as D C, Marvel and Dell. I can tell you with certainty that they initially helped increase my vocabulary and instilled in me a love of reading. A lot of the criticism of comics comes from people who think that children are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words.

Possibly it may be the case with some children, yes. But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words. Then there was the day I was chosen to enter a public school essay contest, which was conducted in the neighbouring convent hall.

I wrote fast and furiously scribbling with unrestrained zest and finished almost an hour before the deadline. I even had time to pen a revised version on fresh foolscaps and still had time on my hands. I noticed that the desk drawer I was writing on was open and inside was a steamy romance comic. So I placed my completed essay on the desk and became engrossed in its romantic contents.

I heard a polite “excuse me” and turned around to observe an invigilator nun looking down at me. She inquired whether I had finished my essay. I pointed to my completed masterpiece. She giggled and asked me to continue reading on condition that I hand her the comic after I finish. “It looks interesting,” she said scanning the cover. “I will take it and see if it should be censored from lying around the place.”

I responded with a smile: “Thank you kindly sister. You are a jolly good sport. And let me assure you that everyone with a ‘pun’ track mind will be ‘nun’ the wiser about your kind disposition!”

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