Cosmic Log – Bam! How comics teach science.

The source article above doesn’t have much to do with this post other than invoking some buried thoughts from my childhood. The comics they talk about in no way resemble the ones I read when I was a kid. I haven’t been around comic books in years so I don’t know what the general contexts are now. In my day it was about Superman, Spiderman, Archie, and hundreds of others. But one thing I am pretty sure of is that I’m sure of is that is where I gained my first real interest in science.

The picture on each comic book frame was just the starting point. My mind would visually make up a hundred more pictures to go along with that one.  I would almost invent my own story with each frame I read.  Of course those were the days before I had all that creativity squashed from my brain by the adults of the world. Reading comic books got me to wondering about what the world was really about and what was possible for the future. I was a weird kid I guess because I actually dreamed a lot about the future. One of my daily things was to pick a date in the future and try to imagine what I would be doing then.

In some regards I guess I was kind of like the kid named Brick in the TV series The Middle. I enjoyed my books more than about anything. It started out with comic books and then grew to the Hardy Boys series. From there it went into SciFi stuff. I, like the character in the TV series always felt a little out of place with the rest of the world. But all that scifi stuff got me really interested in science that would continue even to today.

I am glad I had comic books when I was a kid. They definitely helped make me who I am now. I hope there are still things around that spurn a creative imagination in our youth today and that parents won’t try to drug their kids with Ritalin just because the might be different from what they want them to be. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I allowed others strangle my childhood creativity into oblivion.So here I am more than five decades later trying to rediscover some of that creativity I abundantly had as a child.  I hope I can find at least a little remnant of it left someplace down deep in my brain.