Comics on the brain

I haven’t been blogging much because my father just moved in with me. Dad suffers from dementia and is also recovering from brain surgery. A big chunk of his long-term memory seems to be just gone, which leaves him with little to think or talk about, even though he is more lucid and alert than he was a few months ago. So I’m looking for things that will amuse him and stimulate his memory a bit.

The evening Dad arrived, I was at Art Spiegelman’s talk at the Peabody-Essex Museum, which I covered for a local paper. The next day, while I was trying to figure out what to talk to him about, I remembered something Spiegelman said:

Comics burn their way into your brain because comics do what your brain does. The way you get images, the way you remember things, is not in a hologram … A baby when a week or two old can recognize a “Have a nice day” face and recognize it as connected to its mother’s smile. We’re wired to get these iconic images, these simple images.

So I did a little experiment: I got out a book of Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” strips (a Spiegelman favorite) and showed it to him.
It worked.

Something about those strips really got to Dad. He’s too young to remember them actually running in the paper, and he couldn’t read them (my book is in French), but he really got into looking at the pictures. The next day I took him to the library and we picked out a couple of books of old newspaper strips–the Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat, Li’l Abner. He looked at them for hours and talked about them for days. This is a man who literally can’t remember what happened two minutes ago. He can’t recall my mother, to whom he was married for 44 years. Yet he remembers the setup of Krazy Kat. I think Spiegelman is right; comics must reach down to some essential core in the brain.

Interestingly, Dad was always a comics reader, at a time when that was considerably less socially acceptable for an adult than it is now. The fact that he was a theoretical physicist teaching at a major university helped mute any criticism. He mostly went for the funny stuff—the Sunday funnies, Archie, the British weeklies when we lived overseas, and of course, Mad.

As he adjusts to living here, Dad has gotten more lucid, and we’ve found more things to interest him—classical music, his old readers from when he was in grade school, a book on ancient Egypt, drives to the ocean or the country. It seems like some of his long-term memory has returned, at least on his good days. But even on a bad day, he likes the funny papers.