Geek Girl Navigating the World – My Big Weekend with Buck Rogers
There has to be some background for this column, or at least a little bit of story, just so readers can understand why I would be so excited about a particular book that I finally found in my favorite used bookstore a couple of weeks ago.
This whole thing really starts back when I was a tiny little starry-eyed sprocket. My mom and dad took me to dinner at a restaurant that just happened to have those square gumball machines that had a glass panel in the front and those plastic capsules with little toys or pieces of jewelry or other gewgaws sure to attract the attention of small children and make them beg endlessly to get something and relieve their parents of the horrible burden of all that change in their pockets. The machine that I was eying had a shiny holographic printed card in the front with stars and satellites and a futuristic curved font. I remember a royal blue color and a strange landscape on it. My dad went ahead and dug the necessary coin from his pocket and put it into the slot, which I was too little to actually reach. He held me up so I could turn the handle myself, because I’m pretty sure that I demanded to be the one to do it. The crank clicked, and with a hollow thwack the magical miniscule bit of cheap plastic was delivered to my little waiting hands.
I couldn’t open that capsule myself. This was back in an era when the caps on them actually snapped onto them pretty firmly, so Dad had to pry the thing apart. Once it was finally released from its packaging, I found myself to be the proud recipient of a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Decoder Ring. It was one of those shiny, flimsy adjustable tin rings that will fit any finger so long as you have the patience to shape it. At that age, I didn’t have to have the patience to shape it. I had Dad to do that for me, which he did. For the next few days, that ring was The Best Thing Ever. I wore it everywhere. I probably showed it off to everyone who would hold still long enough. The real amusing part of the situation now is that I didn’t have the faintest clue who Buck Rogers actually was. It didn’t matter. I had the nifty, sparkly ring, and it was awesome.
As I grew, I eventually misplaced the Buck Rogers decoder ring, but I became a reader, and everyone around me soon figured out that if you wanted to distract me and keep me quiet for a while, all you really needed to do was give me a book. My family pretty much insists that I was born with a book in my hands, and, to be honest, I don’t actually remember a time when I couldn’t read. I have always loved books, and my parents and my family really encouraged that.
The next time that I encountered Buck Rogers, I was still a pretty small sprocket. I would go to my grandparents’ house; since I was the oldest grandchild, there weren’t really a lot of toys to play with, and, since we lived in a very rural area, there were two and a half TV stations on a good day. On a bad day, which was most of the time, the only TV option was news, and that was my choice for entertainment. There were some encyclopedias on the shelf–believe me, I read them. I read those encyclopedias until I couldn’t read them any more, and then, I read them a couple more times because those were the books that I had available to look at when I was there. I’m not sure that it’s all that good for a four year-old to know how gelatin is made, but that was one of the things in that set of encyclopedias that I remember pretty vividly. It didn’t bother me in the slightest, really, because I liked reading, and I felt very grown up because I could look information up by myself in the encyclopedia set.
Eventually, my grandma found some old books that were still in her house from my dad and his brothers. Mostly they were little paperbacks with collections of old comic strips in them. There was a Heathcliff book, a Marmaduke book, a Tumbleweeds book, a collection of science fiction stories, a book of Green Hornet comics, and another that had Buck Rogers comics. Naturally, as soon as I discovered this little treasure trove, I devoured them. The Heathcliff and Marmaduke and Tumbleweeds books were funny, and I enjoyed them many, many times, but I was really drawn to that Buck Rogers book.
There were words in the book that I didn’t understand. As a child, it’s hard to grasp what a “Mongol” is, and I know that I didn’t have the faintest clue what that meant. As far as I was concerned, Mongol was synonymous with alien. They were just aliens that were people-shaped, a concept that I was already quite familiar with because I had seen old episodes of Star Trek and Doctor Who by that time. I liked that the landscapes were familiar-looking; this was stuff that I knew existed around me, and there were some place names in the comic strips that were familiar. But the world in this book that seemed so familiar, at the same time contained an enormity of wonders. Crop sprayers in the area where I grew up flew planes that looked just like the one Buck Rogers was flying, but Buck Rogers’ plane had rockets in it, too, and disintegrating rays. There were laser pistols and funny costumes and all kinds of action. Someone always had to be saved.
The Buck Rogers book was probably one of the first times that I remember making up my own stories, because, unlike those Marmaduke and Heathcliff cartoons, I could completely make up my own story to go with the pictures. There was so much action going on in each individual strip that after I had read the book enough times to get bored with the story actually happening, or when there was just too much that I didn’t quite get because I didn’t quite understand why gravity was really all that important, I could change the words in my head to make a new story from the pictures. It was a very special kind of magic, there, in a cheap paperback book that was falling apart long before I ever got to look at it.
I knew enough about seeing the rockets and the ray guns and the strange costumes to know that this was a make-believe story, and that opened up a wealth of possibilities in my growing brain. The stories that I made up could incorporate all of these interesting things in this book and make perfect sense, even when almost none of those things really existed in the same world that I inhabited. It was an enthralling discovery, and it was one that kept me busy and out of trouble for hours at a stretch.
Eventually, that little trove of books at my grandparents’ house was gifted to me. My personal library still contains the Heathcliff book and the Marmaduke book, along with that first Tumbleweeds book and that collection of science fiction stories, which has one of my favorite sci-fi stories ever in it. Somehow, though, along the way, Green Hornet and Buck Rogers got lost. They never came to stay at my house, and they never found the sanctuary that would have been my library. I don’t know what actually happened to them. One day, they just weren’t at my grandparents’ house anymore. My best guess is that either those two volumes got so tattered that my grandma finally decided to throw them away, or they went home with either one of my uncles or one of my smaller cousins. Still, I’m glad for the hours that I spent with those books and the things that I learned from reading them.
At this point in my youth, I was also finding that I was drawn to cartoons in a huge way. The animation obsession persists to this very day, and I’m completely unapologetic for that. There is an amazing amount of art and beauty that people ignore because it’s a “cartoon” and, therefore, extremely easy to dismiss. It’s also easy to dismiss the incredible storytelling that happens through animation and comics, which is an attitude that I would love to see change more rapidly than it is. There’s certainly more that I could say there, and I probably will, but in a different column.
All of this was happening at a time when The Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck Show was still running on major network TV. Every Saturday morning, I was parked on that couch with my bowl of cereal (usually Cap’n Crunch) watching Bugs and Daffy and all the other Looney Tunes on my screen, brightening my day six minutes at a time. Sometimes Dad would sit there on the couch with me and watch, and sometimes it was just me. One of my favoritecartoons was “Duck Dodgers in the 25th and a Half Century.”
I didn’t make the connection, then, that this was actually a magnificently brilliant parody of Buck Rogers. I just remember Daffy in his green shirt and his funny, cowl-like helmet with the little yellow bobbly thing on it and Porky Pig in his ridiculous purple leotard scrambling around insanely trying to protect themselves from that wily and angry Marvin the Martian. I did understand the visual pun involved in the disintegrating ray gun and marveled at the alien landscapes on Planet X (which I would discover, much later in life, actually closely resemble some of the beautiful rock formations outside Cody, Wyoming). While I watched the cartoon, I took it at the simplest face value, which was, essentially, Daffy and Porky having a space adventure, because Looney Tunes characters can do anything. When the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD sets were released, I was thrilled to find out that I was now a proud owner of “Duck Dodgers” and, as a slightly more refined, though no less starry-eyed grown sprocket, I can much better appreciate all of the thought and attention to detail that was involved in spoofing those beloved sci-fi serials that I also love watching and reading.
That still doesn’t explain, really, why I mentioned a Buck Rogers book at the beginning of this column. Fear not, I’m getting there, I promise, it’s just relevant to the whole story for me to share the history of how I first encountered and learned about Buck Rogers. When I was fourteen, my family ended up visiting this little second hand store in a tiny town fairly close to where most of us lived. I was wondering around aimlessly, looking at a few odds and ends, when I saw a book lying on a table. Since there was a book in the store, I immediately had to see what kind of book it was.
I was greeted by the sight of a large coffee-table book with a dustjacket. The dustjacket was white and printed with eye-searingly florescent comic panels. There was a ray gun and a rocket ship on the cover, and there, in brilliant blue and red and yellow, were Buck and Wilma. I stared in fascination at this book, and then, of course, I had to open it. It was filled with Buck Rogers comic strips, most of which I had never seen because the Buck Rogers book that I used to read was a much smaller and far less inclusive volume. There was a price tag of five dollars on it. I knew that I desperately wanted this book, so, I did the only thing that I could at the time. I begged my mom to buy it for me. Mom, being a parent, did the only thing that she could do at the time. She said no.
Thus begun a period in which my family would make an annual pilgrimage to the second hand store, and I would hunt through it until I found that Buck Rogers book. It was always in a different place every time we went back to the store. Every time, I would find it. I would flip through it and feel that pang of desperate longing to take the book home with me so I could read it in its entirety, because even as fast as I can read, my family wasn’t going to be spending enough time in the store for me to get all the way through it. My mom stuck to her resolve, though, and said no every time. I accepted that, even if I didn’t understand the
reasoning behind it.
Finally, I turned eighteen. I had my own job, I had my own money, and I had my own car. So, when it came time to go to that second hand store, I was prepared. I had more than enough cash to finally, finally purchase that huge Buck Rogers book and make it my own. We got to the store and I immediately began my hunt. I went through every room, looked on every shelf, and finally, with growing panic, asked the clerk behind the counter who told me that they “finally sold that ugly old thing.” My heart was broken.
This was a time before I had started keeping the list of books that I want to buy, now affectionately known as “The Hellacious Book List,” and it is a thing of wonder and beauty to behold. I didn’t know what the actual title of the book was, much less who the author was. By this point, I had enough experience with books, especially those books that compile comic strips, to know that knowing the artist and writer for Buck Rogers wouldn’t necessarily help me all that much, especially if the person who compiled the book was credited as an editor.
Since that day, I have tried searching for the book through every one of my resources, from looking in random used bookstores hoping that one will turn up, to checking to see if libraries have a copy, to searching on Ebay and various used book selling sites. Every search has yielded less than nothing. I could not find even a trace of the book, even though I could picture that garish cover as clearly as if I could pick the book up any time I wanted. I never gave up hope that I would, eventually, manage to find one, but I thought the chances were marginal at best.
Fast forward to three weeks ago. I was in the used bookstore that is practically my second home. They know me there, because I’ve been a very regular customer for well over a decade at this point. Not only do they know me, they know my tastes well enough to save back items that they’re pretty sure I’d love to get. I’d never really mentioned the Buck Rogers book to them. I’m not sure why, I suppose because there are so many other books that I was looking for that I felt I had a far better chance of finding. I was also embarrassed to walk up to them and ask them to find me a book when all that I could tell them was what the cover looked like, that it was enormous, and that it was about Buck Rogers. I’d done enough searches on my own to see that this description was going to be less than helpful, and I didn’t want to waste anyone else’s time on what I was certain was going to be an even bigger wild goose chase than I had already undertaken.
I was wandering around the sci-fi/fantasy section of the store, scanning the shelves to see if there was anything there that I needed to take home with me, when I felt a strong urge to look down. There are often piles of books waiting to be shelved in their proper sections, and sometimes I look at them, and sometimes I don’t. It’s often very dependent upon whether I’ve tripped over them or stubbed my toes on them or not. This time, though, I just felt like I should look down, so I did.
Immediately, I could hear choirs of angels singing, filling the air around me with the sweet strains of their unearthly music. The heavens opened and golden sunlight streamed down over me, illuminating the book propped so casually against a cabinet. My heart leaped in my chest and I promptly snatched that glorious volume from the carpeted floor and cradled it to my chest, all the while grinning like an idiot. It was The Book. There, in my favorite used bookstore. The price didn’t matter. The condition didn’t matter. All that mattered was that this Buck Rogers book, which I had despaired of ever finding, was now mine. I carried it to the counter and reverently laid it on the glass top, asking for it to go on my hold shelf until I could come and pay for it (there’s a reason that I don’t always take my wallet into the used bookstore with me, and it’s a very good one). They understood, even as I gleefully spilled out the story of my pursuit of this book. Before they’d heard it, they knew what had just happened.
So, on Wednesday, I purchased my very own copy of The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century which has an introduction by Ray Bradbury. I carried it home and then waited to read it until Friday night. (I had to wait to read it until Friday night because I knew, once I started reading it I wasn’t going to stop until I had gotten all the way through it.) This is a book that is larger than my laptop and clocks in at over 370 pages. Waiting hurt. I had to talk myself out of starting it so many times that I lost count, but I knew that if I gave in, I wouldn’t be able to just stop and do the other things that I needed to get done.
I came home Friday night, cooked myself a pizza, and went to my room to read. The comics are reproduced four to a page on thick paper that has turned to a faint ivory tone with age (this was printed in the seventies), but it is printed in such good quality that the ink remains dark black and crisp and the section that is in color has stayed beautifully bright. The dustjacket has damage–there are some tears, but it’s been protected with a plastic protector, so it is protected from any further deterioration.
The book is heavy. It’s hardbound, and it was obviously meant to be a volume for serious collectors. I read. And I read. Then, I read some more. Ray Bradbury’s introduction has given me at least two quotes that truly resonated for me. “You do not start with quality. You start with dreams and the dreams must be large because you are so small, so unequal to the tasks you wish to set for yourself”; and “My God, when are we going to relax and know and accept all this, and get on with our creativity without feeling guilty or having to alibi for great loves which seem silly or trivial to others?” Yes, I would argue, based on that introduction, that of all the Geeks in the world, Ray Bradbury was, in fact, our king.
I read that introduction twice, because I knew that little nine year-old-boy Ray Bradbury wrote so stirringly about, because I was the girl version of him. I was defending my love of dinosaurs, being drawn to science fiction and science itself, and my love of comics, against an onslaught of expectations about how little girls should behave and what they should like. It seems, sometimes, that nothing irks the world so much as a little girl who refuses to deny her inner starry-eyed little sprocket the joys of Buck Rogers comics or dreams of robots and dinosaurs and vast dragons circling the sky. To the credit of both of my parents (Mom usually didn’t say no to books or comics when I begged her for them, it just never seemed to be that magical moment when she could say yes to that one particular book), they were never the ones telling me that little girls shouldn’t be interested in that, which does wonders for the ability to maintain budding Geekhood.
The comics themselves haven’t changed. I have, though it isn’t any detriment to the pleasure of reading those comics. I have to remember the historical context in which these stories were written. What today is a racist stereotype and an offensive word was nothing back then, and Wilma was a revolutionary character in the 1920s when she was created. Because I do love comics so much and I have read some of those old comics (in collections and reproductions, of course), I understand, as an adult, that Wilma was an incredibly strong female character for her time. She bails herself out and saves Buck just as often as Buck Rogers
rescues her. She is a smart woman, and capable. She’s strong-willed, and she doesn’t just sit back and whine (most of the time, although there is a sprained ankle incident pretty early in the book that adheres so closely to the old horror movie trope of the girl tripping and falling that it’s almost enough to induce an “oh please” eye roll). Buck himself is no paragon of perfection. He makes mistakes, he gets lost, but he always maintains his moral compass and manages to find his way back to doing the things that he should be.
There is an artistry to these strips that modern comics have lost, mostly due to space and printing considerations, something that I think has contributed to the slow, painful demise of the printed newspaper. Phil Nowlan was not afraid to make a strip wordy, and that was sometimes highly necessary to forwarding the story. They weren’t afraid to print a strip that was wordy, either. It seems like they understood, then, that comics could tell a far-reaching, serialized story without losing readers if it was a good one. They were full of action and intrigue, quickly-paced, and fun to read. Phil Nowlan was a writer before he started writing Buck Rogers, and it shows, in all the best ways. Nobody does anything just because, there are motivations that fit with the characterization. They don’t do anything “just because,” and there are more explanations than just “well, he’s Buck Rogers, of course he would do that.”
The artwork itself, while still line drawings, is more complex than so many modern newspaper comics. Dick Calkins makes great use of perspective and shading to complement the story. There are consistencies in landscape, in character design, in weaponry, and in costuming that I’ve become more accustomed to seeing in graphic novel or comic book format than in printed comic strips. It’s rare to find a page that doesn’t have at least two or three panels that are simply stunning in both their design and their complexity. You can see the style evolving and refining over the course of the book and Calkins’ confidence as an artist growing.
I stayed up until four in the morning, gloriously lost in the 25th century, one that I hadn’t been able to spend time in since I was a very small girl. Now that I’ve read it through this first time, I know there will be further readings. I will be revisiting Buck and Wilma at my leisure, now and for many years to come. I’ll be taking Mr. Bradbury’s advice fully to heart. I won’t waste time feeling guilty about those silly or trivial things that I love, or listen to the people who say that I should give them up, because they have shaped me, as a person and as a writer and artist. Yes, those angels are still singing, and they’ll keep singing, every time I pick up that beautiful book.
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