“Hey, comics ARE just for kids!”
For years, I have been a fervent admirer of the zine called Duplex Planet. In each issue, David Greenberger interviews old people (originally, the residents of the Duplex Nursing Home) on subjects they seem to have little understanding of. You haven’t truly lived until you’ve heard the aging and the baffled debate the qualities of chipmunks vs. squirrels (both real and animated).
I just stumbled across this interview by a man determined to share his love of comic books, but coming square up against someone with perhaps the world’s foremost comic-book phobia. The depths of his man’s antipathy for the four-color printed page cannot be fully plumbed; suffice it to say, there is something darkly Freudian down there. After the interviewer easily strips away all his protests with the force of logic, the refusals become increasingly determined as well as (I can’t resist) wonderfully comic. Here’s the interview. It’s so bizarre, it seems straight out of Duplex Planet.
And what did I do after reading this? Read a comic book, of course.