Flip the Grip, Fileboner!
It’s no secret that I have a big love on for the media of the past, especially in the form of books and comics. Part of this is due to the sheer entertainment value of it all - there’s usually a reason that something has managed to survive the vagaries of time and human distractability, right? - but in addition to the content of the work there’s often a completely fascinating element of trying to figure out exactly what was going on in the heads of the person or persons responsible.
Here, look at this:
For a long time, every DC comic had something like this, a little half- or full-page filler like "Flash Facts" or "Metal Facts and Fancies", possibly so that they could claim some portion of their content was educational. Of them all, I prefer "Science Says You’re Wrong if You Believe That…" because it’s the only one that flat-out insults the reader. These things are terrific insights into what the heck people were caring about at the time that they were written, or at least what comics writers were caring about. For example, read enough stuff from the 60s and you’ll see that bit about deadly gasses from the tail of a comet coming up again and again, though nowadays it’s gone the way of the classic plot to kill someone with a weak heart by scaring them to death. So were people obsessed with comets or was it just a case of writers getting as much use as they could out of a stlye of disaster with a lot of dramatic appeal?
With every one of these things you learn more about the people who wrote them, whether it be through what they felt needed to be debunked or what they were wrong about or how early they were right about something that you maybe thought was such a very contemporary bit of knowledge. I wish that I could have found the one on superstitions of the world, because it’s a fantastic example of the absolute rock-solid belief in Science that characterized so many of the comics of the 50s and 60s.
Which is all a very long introduction to this:
… which I found in Lois Lane No 16, from way the heck back in 1960. What’s going on here? Is this a guide? Some sort of mockery (look how funny you teen types talk.)? Heck, is it even accurate? I can’t believe that there’s a variation on the theme of Nerd that contains the word "boner" and has fallen into disuse.
Man, can’t you just feel the attempt to figure out what the heck those crazy teens are talking about? All writing down what the copy boys say to each other and then quizzing them on it in private later?
It’s okay if you don’t, though. I’m not here to make sure that your experience of the world is identical to mine. No, what I’m here for is to make sure that you all know about the word hip-happy.
Hip-happy means plump!
Geez, the comet thing itself comes from a legit source - I remember Carl Sagan referring to it in one of his books. There was an actual panic around a comet (Halley’s?) at one time.
What’s wrong with a rock solid belief in science, O person writing on the internet using electricity and a computing engine? I hope you’ll return to this subject if you do find the entry on superstitions…
Oh, there’s nothing wrong with a rock-solid belief in science, but it ain’t what we have now - that and the comet thing were kind of meant to be a bit of a contrast with the state of thinking nowadays but I drifted a bit too much.
It’s not so much that the comet thing is too ridiculous to believe, it’s that nobody concerns themselves with it any more. Likewise, you have not seen someone scoff at the supernatural like a 1960s DC character. Such thinking is not nearly so prevalent today as it was then.
Ah, that makes sense. It was the age of Asimov, after all! We’ve gone from moon landings to moon-landing hoax conspiracy believers since then.
And it looks like it was Halley’s Comet, in 1910, that started the first panic, with one of the earliest uses of spectroscopy to detect elements in cometary tails.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/05/dayintech_0519/
The NY Times reported it at the time:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9803E0DC1530E233A25752C1A9639C946196D6CF
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9803E0DC1530E233A25752C1A9639C946196D6CF
The title “SCIENCE SAYS YOU’RE WRONG…” is of course referring to Bill Science, who was the fileboner of the DC offices at the time. He also said you’re wrong if you believe that it was him who finished the last of the coffee and didn’t make a fresh pot.
I sense the hand of Haney in all this Teen Talk jazz.
I just want to say that everything about this post is awesome.
The part about the comet kills me, but that might be because I was such a fileboner in science.