With my hometown team in the Sweet Sixteen, I thought I’d dig through the archives of a long-defunct, long-offline version of Sample Reality and repost the only thing I’ve ever written about the NCAA. It begins with this Nike advertisement from 2000, a fantastic little commercial produced by Wieden & Kennedy (Portland, Oregon), which illustrates Marx’s idea of the commodity as a “social hieroglyph” better than, well, better than Marx ever did.
Quite simply, what we find in the advertisement above is the fantasy that Nike shoes literally grow on trees. They are not the products of human labor, but the produce of the earth, nourished by the sun and sold at a farmer’s market in sleepy Bracketville, a fictional town created by Nike during the 2000 NCAA championship.
Bracketville, where “dreams grow on trees,” is the fanciful antipode to Indonesia and Vietnam [and now, in 2008, China], where most of Nike’s shoe production actually occurs. Dismal working conditions are disavowed, by both Nike and its customers, and replaced by pleasant images of sunshine and plenitude. Women and children factory workers, whose labor is congealed in every pair of “Air Flight” shoes, disappear, leaving behind no trace. The factories disappear as well. Indeed, Nike itself vanishes. In the corporation’s place we find only the friendly local farmer, selling his home-grown shoes to eager American customers. In a bizarre twist of logic, $1.20 worth of labor becomes a $90 pair of shoes, which in turn becomes an abundant crop sold by the basket-full. [The shoe-fruit, as I say above, is a social hieroglyph, by which Marx meant a commodity whose origins are obscured, its means of production veiled, and any traces of human labor, hidden.]
Tradermaester-maestertrader Adam remembers young Karol Wojtyla (henceforth known as “the pope boy”) running through the streets of Poland in Marvel’s comic book adaptation of his life. I’m happy to bolster Adam’s memory with these EXCLUSIVE!!! images of the pope boy playing soccer in his hometown of Wadowice (larger image).
For my part, the image from the comic book that has stayed with me for over 25 years, the image which I don’t even have to open up the comic book to recall in vivid detail is the Pope skiing (actually, he was only a cardinal then, but who’s keeping track?). Look at him go!
What form! What grace! What cool pope shades! (Larger Image)
Inspired by the strange coincidences between Adam’s and my first forays into comic books as children, I’ve dug up this gem from my attic: Marvel Comic’s “The Life of Pope John Paul II” (full size image). Published in 1982, this graphic biography (as opposed to a graphic novel) tells the “entire story” of Pope John Paul II “from his childhood in Poland to the assassination attempt!”
What excitement! What exclamation marks!
I bring up this prematurely illustrated hagiography now because I got this comic from a trade with Adam in the early eighties. It was Adam’s and now it’s mine. My question is: what the hell did I trade for it? And how did Adam persuade me that this comic was worth a trade in the first place? Sure I was a good Roman Catholic boy, but so was Adam. He should’ve wanted the comic book just as much as he convinced me that I wanted it. And gosh, the assassination sounds like a good enough read, but I’m sure whatever I traded had some pretty violent bits too. So why did I do it? I don’t know, and for years I secretly harbored a resentment that I had been had.
It wasn’t until decades later, when the pope died, that I realized perhaps this musty old comic book had some value. So — and I now admit that this was the real impetus for rescuing my comics from my parent’s attic — after the pope’s death, and probably even before the new pope was picked, I logged on to eBay, prepared to sell this “collector’s item” to some sobbing, mourning Catholic desperate for one last piece of pope memorabilia.
Yes. I planned to profit on the pope’s passing.
Does this make me a bad person? A good person doing a bad thing? A sinner? A seller? A merchant of death?
I don’t know. But I do know that I wasn’t the only one with this idea. Apparently all across the country were hundreds of other adults who had held onto their misbegotten Pope John Paul II collectible comic books from their childhood. Because there was a glut of pope comics on eBay. Dozens of the very same comic, all for sale for the highest bidder. It was a buyer’s market in pope comics. So saturated was the market that I didn’t even bother to sell.
So here I am, a few years later, faded old pope pictures in hand, my chance to make something of a decades-old trade with Adam long gone.
Or, not…
Maybe Adam still has whatever it was I traded for Marvel’s “Life of Pope John Paul” and he’s finally ready for a counter-trade…
I’m torn between which metaphor best describes my life: either I’m a mouse on a treadmill, running in place, getting nowhere, or I’m a rat in a maze, going blindly down random paths in order to get that cheese, which, face it, isn’t much of a prize.
Consider this: I work a high-prestige, low-paying job in order to pay for my children’s preschool so that I have time to work in my high-prestige, low-paying job. So I can pay for school. So I can work. On and on it goes, etc.
Mouse on a treadmill or rat in a cage? I don’t know, but either way I’m a rodent.
Adam and I have been friends for over thirty years — he’s one of the few people I regularly keep in touch with from my childhood. And lately Adam’s been mining our childhood for memories of our individual and collective comic book “habit,” writing some wonderful reflections upon comic books and what they’ve meant to him through the years. Adam’s most recent recollection describes buying his first comic book with his own money — Superfriends No. 13 — and he mentions that he is nearly certain I was with him at the time. My memory is more than a little fuzzy about this; I don’t recall it at all. I would’ve been seven at the time.
But I just dug through an old battered cardboard box, hauled around the country with me ever since my parents cleaned out their attic a few years ago, where I haphazardly store my fading, musty collection of comic books. And there it was: Superfriends No. 13, featuring some sort of giant green mutated shrew. So either Adam and I bought the same comic at different times, or we each bought our own copy at the same time (thus avoiding the fate of Bart Simpson’s rare copy of Radioactive Man). Either way, this cover is actually imprinted on my mind, and I didn’t realize how familiar it was until I saw it again (the image here is scanned from my own copy; I’ve also got a larger version where you can see just how wrinkled and scratched this thirty-year-old cover is).
As I was rummaging through my stash of comics I also discovered my first comic book. I didn’t buy it with my own money, so it’s not in the same category as Adam’s, but it is the first comic I remembering owning, reading it over and over. Undoubtedly my parents gave it to me as some sort of bribe on one of our long family car trips. The comic, seen here (larger version), is No. 83 of Captain Atom, one of the many radioactive superheroes who never made it big. (You’ve never heard of him, right?)
Nonetheless there are some surprising coincidences here: (1) Captain Atom bears some resemblance to the Simpson’s Radioactive Man, so here I am again preliving a more wholesome version of the fictional Bart Simpson’s life; (2) I remember that at the time (age six) I thought Captain Atom was Captain Adam, because I knew Adam was my friend, but I had no idea on earth what an atom was; and (3) if you look closely at the larger image, you can see the legendary Steve Ditko’s signature. Captain Atom was one of Ditko’s creations from the early sixties (my version of Captain Atom No. 83 is a reprint of a much earlier appearance), and Ditko would of course go on later to create the much more memorable Spider-Man — the anchor of the Marvel Universe, which I would soon join myself, leaving behind the innocence of the Superfriends, the naive Wonder Friends, and the forgettable Captain Atom…
