Peanuts in the Gallery

Comics, slowly becoming appreciated as literature, are being celebrated in museums too

This is a tale so primal and pitiable that for many a former child it deserves to be retold on an analyst's couch. The boy has fallen in love with comic books; studied and memorized their narrative outrages, their graphic ingenuity; saved them in meticulous stacks or mold-resistant wrappers. Then he hears his mother say she was cleaning up the basement and "I threw that junk out." Junk! the child cries. Those yellowing pages of newsprint, those copies of Mad and Vault of Horror and Weird Science were my obsession, my vocation, my youth--my art.

It has taken 50 years, but...

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