Pop Action At Its Best!

The page from Beware the Creeper by Steve Ditko and letterer Gaspar Saladino (perhaps)  above is a marker of a time and place when suddenly comic books and comic book characters were wildly popular. The iconography of the comic had filtered into the broader culture in a new way, it had quietly slipped into the salons and parlors of the intelligentsia, those blokes and dames who determine what is cool and what is not for the rest of us grunts. For a sweet moment in time comics were cool. (They've since become mainstream, but perhaps not as "cool".)

One of the reasons was Batman, a TV show that took the country by storm and filled our imaginations with all manner of new yet somehow vintage sights and sounds, translated tongue-in-cheek from the pages of decades of yellowing comics. 

The simple "Pow!" became the marker of a sound that never was save in the imagination along with its brothers and sisters like "Zap!" and "Crack!" and such. The sound effect "Foom" achieved such a charm that it became the title of one of Marvel's many fan clubs magazines. 

The museums became a repository to the stuff of the newsstands and celebrated for its potency in a culture which already felt that life was draining from it a bit. It's at once a celebration and an achievement, but also sad in one sense because the "trash" had become "treasure" and that makes it of significance to those who don't love it for its own sake. 

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