The tendency of the comics is to prolong a period by anticipating it before it arrives, sustaining it during its brief passage, and maintaining its illusion after it is gone.

2

Man has always feared change. When he has been shown the future he has resented it. When he finds it in the comics he resents it no less - and he forbids his child to have anything to do with it. That is why our parents were instinctively against Buster. For us the problem is the same as it was for our parents, and it is really our problem, not our children's.

There are only two ways to meet this problem: one is to shut your eyes to it, and the other is to open your arms to it. In terms of their generation, all that is said about the comic magazines by parents who confine themselves to the daily or Sunday funnies is true. It was bad enough when four pages became eight and when all eight came out in color. But to be able to sit down and read sixty-four pages of colored comics - for ten cents - and then read sixty-four more on a swap, and finally become a child with a library of this feebly vicious material, certainly seems the goalless excess of decadence. This is a sub-hell where the devil himself is discipIined.

True or not, this is true for you. In Buster our parents felt a new, picture-minded world and they resented it. Like our parents, we scent a changed world in the comics that our read and we stick with Moon, with Orphan Annie, and with Terry, finding there a refuge from the front page and from the Batman.

Do not let a tempted eye which has strayed out of the lost world of Mutt and Jeff and Gasoline Alley into the present of Terry and the Pirates and Smilin' Jack Martin go into the world of tomorrow. There you are afraid. There only the men of tomorrow can take it. Do not try to deal with the world of Flash Gordan. Don't try to get around with Zatara the magician, with Captain Marvel, or with the Shadow, or the Flame, or the Torch, or the Phantom, or Toro, or Lightning, or Captain America and Bucky, or Spy Smasher, or Magno, or Bullet Man and his flame Bullet Girl. Don't slip into the new dark age with Prince Valiant. Even Superman can hardly take that stuff. Leave the world of tomorrow to the men of tomorrow, but remember that the men of tomorrow are the children of today.

3

That is how to shut your eyes to the menace. If you are to open your arms to it, you must look more deeply into your own guilty reading of the comics and into that of your child whose guilt you have cultivated. Suppose that you wish to look into the sphinx's eye. How can the nightmares that you see there come true?

For one thing, when you look at the comics you read and the comics your child reads, you will realize - and perhaps nobody has ever had such a chance to realize it before - how different is your child's stake in the world from your own. Before your eyes, and with the dime that lie chisels off you, that child is planning the new world, searching for new strength to deal with the old evil which has found wheels and wings. He has already discounted your world - the old world.