by Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg

An Unending Education
If it were up to me, I’d stay in school forever. No, I don’t mean I want to keep eating graham crackers and having nap time (idyllic though that sounds), but I’m a big fan of continuing education. In today’s fast-paced world, there is no longer an obvious break between the academic world and the "real" one. Our education is ongoing as technology and other factors transform around us on a daily basis; advanced degrees are no longer a luxury so much as a necessity if you want to keep your skills sharp. For some of us, education is not relegated to childhood alone, but remains an intrinsic part of our lives through our adult years.

But then collectors already know this, since they engage in educational activities every day as a natural part of their passion for the past. After we’ve left behind those years of three "R"s and classroom hijinks, we relentlessly pursue the artifacts of our childhood and the childhoods of others, and in so doing we begin another education while celebrating perhaps the most surreptitious and successful form of instruction that adults ever devised for children. Confused? Can’t understand how I can claim that comic characters and the collectibles they spawned could be part of an educational effort? Then read on and learn something new!

The Deeper Meaning
When you look back at the state of American society just before the turn of the century, even in the most advanced urban centers, it’s a wonder any artifacts survived at all. Vermin-infested tenements, no electricity for climate control, mass population booms and migration to the big cities – every factor was working against the preservation of cultural history in the form of our cherished toys, and yet they emerged from the societal turmoil to greet another century.

At the same time that all these changes were taking place in the country, the relationships between parents and their children were also transforming. In the first article in this series, we noted that with the growth of urban centers and the shift towards mechanical contrivances – the early encroachment of technological solutions to daily living – there came a day when someone hit upon the idea to create toys that were miniaturized versions of adult gadgets. One of the earliest examples of this might be the emergence of the cap gun as a popular toy following the Civil War, when soldiers brought home their guns and familiarity bred interest in their children. More and more adult objects were altered via the use of cartoonish illustration and colorful design into playthings, and with that came the dawn of a new era in play and toy manufacturing, but the real question we must ask is: Why did this work so well?

When seen from a psychological perspective, the adult/child toy dynamic becomes very clear, based as it is upon a double paradox of subconscious desires on the part of both participants. On the one hand, we have a parent who wishes to provide for a beloved child. That parent wants nothing but the best for the child, and above all wants to protect them from the harsh realities of the adult world for as long as possible. The goal is to prolong childhood and keep the child sheltered and safe, allowing the child to play and explore their imagination without hindrance. On the other hand, that parent knows that the day will come when the child must take on adult responsibilities, so complete protection from all elements of that world would hinder the child’s ability to make the transition later. Therefore, by turning the child’s playthings into facsimiles of the kinds of devices used by adults – cars, trains, tools, telephones, and so on – the parent allows the child to enjoy childhood while on another level educating them in the ways of the adult world (we discussed this in the last article on comic characters as well). The first paradox then is that the parent preserves and prolongs a child’s formative years by giving them the very tools they need to prepare for the longer road ahead.

From the child’s perspective, this also accomplishes two goals. A child wants to play, to engage the imagination and use toys to transport them to other worlds and times, but there is usually a vague sense of longing – a desire to speed up time and join the adult world as soon as possible. So many children think things will be better when they get to be adults, so they long to grow up faster than they should. By providing children with toys that duplicate the trappings of the adult world, parents allow children to indulge their desire for an adult existence while they continue to play and behave as children. This two-fold paradox thus serves as the basis for everything we have come to cherish as collectors.

The Paradox is Born
Beginning in 1842 with the first comic book and through to the early 1880s, there were signs of a new trend in the use of illustrative characters that would eventually culminate in the historic moment when Palmer Cox introduced the Brownies to the world. While it seems we always come back to the Brownies, there’s a good reason for this. Palmer Cox’s creations mark the birth of our modern pop culture world in many ways, both in fictional terms and behind the scenes at the creative level. For our purposes here, the Brownies represent the first time that someone realized just how powerful the illustrative arts could be in reaching children. With a coterie of internationally themed sprites that could travel to distant places and engage in countless adventures, Cox provided American children with their very first fantasy avatars. The Brownies were, in essence, psychological surrogates through which children could live vicariously and experience all the joys of the adult world with none of the hardship, while the Brownies’ "wise sayings" offered some moral guidance along the way.

Consider: Why not simply tell the same stories with adult characters and not these fanciful, diminutive Brownies? With adult figures, children would have no means of instant identification, no easy way "in" to the world they were viewing. But with the Brownies – tiny creatures dwarfed by adults and on the same physical level as their audience – children could identify with them with no difficulty and use them to enter the adult world, play with adult toys and travel to exotic lands, far from the urban slums and isolated farms in which the children lived. ‘If the tiny Brownies can do it, then I can too…one day!’ The Brownies were the first and most powerful means of pure escapism for American children – a means of empowerment and the chance to glimpse a better life – and they paved the way for generations of comic characters yet to be created.

Although many collectors tend to think of the Brownies and Richard Outcault’s creations, the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown, in one group, it wasn’t until twelve years later that Outcault’s Kid arrived to take up the gauntlet, but the new character wasn’t really a worthy successor in the role of educator. His true purpose was to chronicle the experience of the New York boroughs, and as a device for social commentary the Yellow Kid was indeed historic. But would parents point to the Yellow Kid – a poor, starving street urchin – as a role model for their children? Outcault provided just such a role model a short while later, however, when he introduced Buster Brown, whose "resolutions" even provided the necessary moral and ethical lessons required to keep children on the straight and narrow even as they read about Buster Brown’s adventures. The tradition of comic characters as clandestine educators thus continued and thrived for decades to come.

Losing the Way
Let’s be honest – this was always about business first. Profit was paramount and we’re not denying that. Given that, however, there appeared to be a greater sense of ethics in the past, particularly as it applied to raising children, and the comic characters of that time betrayed a more concentrated effort to control the content of the message and convey something of value while they were making their money. Granted, by today’s standards many of these characters and the stories in which they appeared could be seen as politically incorrect today and even downright offensive along racial, ethnic, and gender-based lines. Even the Brownies themselves were a "boys only" club with not a single female Brownie in sight. However, there still seems to be a wide gulf separating the educational aspects of the toys of the past and the ethically bankrupt material offered to the regrettably more jaded children of today.

This brings up an even more sobering question: Did we somehow lose the meaning – that essential educational element – in the toys of the mid- to late 20^th century? Did the ‘Video Age’ skew our purpose and leave us with toys and characters that offered only meaningless violence and empty entertainment? Consider the comic character TV commercial hucksters of the ’70s and ’80s – a virtual parade of anthropomorphic creations that served not as educators or ethical guides as they sold their products; no, their only goal was to preach conspicuous consumption for the sake of it. Eat! Buy! Consume! No more wise sayings, no more resolutions, just power selling and plenty of it.

While there are still plenty of comic characters out there who embody nobler human ideals and aspirations, it behooves us as the de facto historians of the comic character enterprise to evaluate the modern pop culture landscape, find those areas where our effort to educate children has weakened, and bolster our resources once again. In today’s world, the line between childhood and adulthood has blurred to insignificance as children are forced to grow up far too quickly. The paradox we discovered earlier could not function today; children simply aren’t allowed to stay young long enough for it to make any sense. If we are to find that meaning again, and restore the more laudable aspects of some of these beloved characters to their former glory, then the first step would be to develop a deeper awareness of just how much they accomplished in the past. Their role as educators must be documented and revealed to the world at large so their true value can be appreciated. This isn’t about dollars and cents; this is about knowledge.

Finding the Way Back
As others have said before and will say again, time is not the enemy; ignorance is. We need to continue to expand our knowledge of collectibles history just as the collectibles themselves helped to expand our knowledge as growing children. And it doesn’t matter how old something is; we can still know everything there is to know about it if we care enough to find out. If there’s one thing that annoys me more as a collector and pop culture fan than any other, it’s that ridiculous recurring phrase: "That’s before your time." Let’s look at one specific example from my own life. I’m 31, and yet I’ve been a Marx Bros. fan all my life. I know details about their personal lives, their film careers and can probably quote every line from their movies verbatim. But their last full-fledged film was released in 1946 (I’m not counting 1949’s Love Happy), which of course is well "before my time." How did I come by this magical knowledge? Simple – I sought it out because I wanted to know and I learned about it. Shocking, isn’t it? Apparently, to some people it is.

To say that hated phrase to anyone is to suggest that they are too narrow-minded or foolish to learn about anything that did not take place in their actual lifetime. What’s even more galling is that we expect people to retain information about the history of the human race from the time of Moses to the Battle of Hastings and beyond, and yet if a young person demonstrates knowledge about a movie or song from twenty years before their date of birth, we’re stunned. Is the common cultural history that shapes our lives and our world that unimportant to us that we presume ignorance rather than demanding knowledge?

As we noted before, time is not our enemy. It doesn’t matter how old some of these characters and collectibles become. What matters is having a wealth of documented information about them, and the passion to motivate us to seek that information for the benefit of future generations who might want to know more about things that existed "before their time." Our lives may be short, but our history and our culture can be eternal if we make the effort.

Another Call to Arms
As we now see, comic character collectibles have been a far more significant factor in the education of children than we ever guessed. In fact, they may be the most powerful and effective teachers of all, since their messages were not delivered overtly in the classroom and were therefore more willingly received. How ironic that after all these years, when so many have maligned comic characters as a dangerous distraction for children who should be focusing on dry texts and tedious routine scholastic work, it was the comic characters themselves who were the finest educators of all!

And is this perhaps one of the principle factors that motivate collectors as they move through adulthood? As we document the history of all these artifacts that were used to educate children about the world, are we still being attracted by the design, the illustration, the underlying message on some subconscious level? Are we still being educated? Or do we wish we were back there, learning all over again? Perhaps so, and if that’s the case, it’s all the more important that we understand more about the nature of the hobby in which we are so enveloped.

The education continues, but we need all of you to insure that it does. The further we get from those early beginnings of the comic characters in the late 1800s, the harder it is to gather data about them. If anyone has information about those early collectibles, either through pictures, paper documentation, or anecdotal evidence, please feel free to contact us via Scoop. The big picture of the collecting universe is only now coming into focus, but we can’t bring it into sharp relief without your help!

As we said in the previous article, collectors retain a spark of childhood that never dies. They perpetuate their education through comic character collectibles by refocusing their intellectual efforts on the history of the artifacts themselves, and they in turn preserve that history for future generations to enjoy. We are all engaged in that "never-ending quest" to learn and document the history of the hobby, and I can think of no better call to arms than that which was declared in the last part of this series: "Do it out of respect for the past. Do it out of obligation to the future." Let me add one more reason: Do it because it keeps the child in you alive.

Happy collecting!