Remembering…

Remembering back to the holidays and birthdays of my childhood thirty some odd years ago, I realize that I’ve forgotten many of the presents I was given.  Generally speaking, I could count on my uncle for a Lego set (at the time the only options were Lego town or space) and my grandparents on my mom’s side were always good for an outfit.  I never did much appreciate the clothes they gave me–but I was always grateful for the wrapping paper.  You see, my grandmother would wrap my gifts with the pages of the Sunday comics, aka “The Sunday Funnies.”

I loved reading comics.

I especially loved reading them on Sundays, when they were given the color treatment.  I would come home from church and stalk the house for the paper, so I could get my hands on the latest escapades of Beetle Baily and Hagar the Horrible and Heathcliff and Garfield and–am I forgetting any other orange cat cartoons?

My hometown paper had a couple pages of color comics, but my grandparents?  They lived much closer to New York City, and their “big city” Sunday paper had two or three times as many cartoons!  Those that didn’t end up as gift wrap sat in a pile in gran’s attic, awaiting my arrival.  Truthfully, there wasn’t much for a kid to do at my grandparents’ house when the weather outside was poor, so I just sat–sometimes even in the attic, immediately after grabbing the topmost pages from the pile–and read and read.  I would read so many colored comics that my fingertips would ingest the ink from the pages and my eyes would begin to see halftone dots everywhere I looked.

Looking back, my grandmother, alive during the Great Depression, was probably just being thrifty when she chose to wrap my gifts in Sunday funnies.  But in doing so, she presented extraordinary blessings–blessings of laughter and artistic appreciation that stimulate me to this day.

See the evidence as follows:

(My crack at a punchy 1-panel comic, a la “The Far Side” or Bizarro.”)

I’ll venture to post a cartoon such as this every week.