I’ve run across a couple of interesting items today that I’d like to share, both courtesy of Mark Evanier. Evanier is an interesting guy, a Los Angeles-based writer who has worked in television (notably, he penned for many of the Saturday morning cartoons that rotted my brain as a kid) and comics (he was apprenticed under the legendary Jack Kirby and is a friend and colleague of Sergio Aragonés). He is also a Las Vegas enthusiast, amateur historian and unabashedly sentimental nostalgic. He’s the sort of guy I would happily call “friend,” if I could finagle some way to meet him, and his frequently-updated blog is on my daily hit list.

Anyway, the first thing Evanier directed me to was a fantastic New York Times op-ed piece by Michael Chabon in which he discusses the nature of the teenage mind, the reason why teens seem to be drawn to the Darker Side of entertainment and art, and the folly of trying to protect our children from the uglier aspects of life. As someone who read a helluva lot of Stephen King, Robert E. Howard, and other violent fictions while growing up without suffering any ill effects, I tend to agree with Chabon’s logic. This is a literate, thought-provoking piece that I highly recommend to anyone who has kids or who cares about freedom of expression. And, incidentally, if you haven’t read Chabon’s novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, do yourself a favor and pick it up immediately. It was the best fiction I read last year.

The other item of interest is a personal essay by Evanier himself in which he remembers his childhood hang-out, a Los Angeles drugstore where he bought comic books, discovered his first girlie magazine, made a friend of the proprietor, and first felt the sting of losing a place that really mattered to him in the name of “progress.” I found this essay very moving, and it evoked my own childhood memories of buying comics off the rack in a drugstore that has long since been torn down. It’s a good piece. I hope you enjoy it.