It’s said that there are only a few established art and entertainment forms that America can truly call its own — baseball, jazz music and comic books.  It’s a bit of a hubristic statement, not surprising coming from a country as relatively young yet as vast as our own.  It almost sounds as if we’re trying to convince ourselves of our own cultural relevance — even more so because we realize that each of these things has its roots elsewhere.  But hey, so do most of us.  And just as this “nation of immigrants” has brought disparate peoples into a “melting pot” atmosphere wherein their contributions have mixed to form a melange all its own, so have jazz, comics and baseball taken previously existing elements and turned them into something new and unique.

Now, I don’t know much about jazz, so I leave that topic for someone more savvy than me to tackle. But speaking of tackling, George Carlin has a famous monologue where he contrasts the essential natures of baseball and (American) football, so I thought it would be interesting to compare baseball to “mainstream” (i.e., primarily “Big Two”) comics. I believe the two have more things in common than many people may realize. Both are team efforts in which individuals can excel and stand out, but which have the best outcome when everyone involved is working toward the same goal (in baseball, winning the game; in comics, telling the story). Both have bullpens and wacky nicknames (as Stan Lee well knew), and both have equally enthusiastic fan bases. And while the split between baseball fans and comics fans has always been presented as a “jocks versus nerds” scenario, both of those stereotypes have been pretty well dismantled in recent years. Despite American baseball still not being gender integrated (but hey, it only took a century from its inception to integrate the game racially) it boasts male and female aficionados of a wide age range. Despite American mainstream comics being largely created by and targeted to straight white post-adolescent males, they too have drawn in male and female readers and admirers of all ages.

There’s something quintessentially welcoming about the game, and the literature, of amazing visual possibilities and poetry – something that can’t be squelched by all the talk about contracts and exclusives and all the business stuff that’s extraneous to spectators, that’s beside the point of what happens between the white lines or the black borders. We all know it’s there, and admit it has its place, but that it’s more the realm of the voracious media who need their daily dose of sensationalist copy and crave the breaking story even when it’s a non-story. Mountains are made from minutiae – is this pitcher healthy? What about that book’s lateness? Did he really sign a 2-year contract for that much money, and will it include his creator-owned work? Was he on steroids when he drew that or what? (more…)