Back when I was in Grade 9, I spent an awful lot of time drawing. A good chunk of that was comics. For a 15-year-old, I thought I was pretty decent.
A relative just happened to be a friend of Tom Grummett, a well-known Canadian comic book artist based in Saskatoon. Grummett gained acclaim for his work on the Superman series, among others, and even drew the 1993 Death of Superman. My cousin took the time to take me to Grummett's home where I got a chance to visit with a real artist in his studio. Keep drawing, he said, and keep submitting. That's how you get into it.
I thought of that recently while looking through The Best of Archie Comics: 70th Anniversary Special that I have bought for our daughter a little while ago. Archie comics have evolved little over seven decades of printing. An artist from the 1950s could easily pick up a pencil and with a little adaptation, draw in the current style. But when it comes to more conventional, superhero comics, that is far from the truth.
Grummett's work, when I met him around 1990, was part of a generation of artists who put enormous punch into their work. It was transformational. It made Stan Lee's work of the 1960s and '70s look like the scribblings of a junior high kid, or worse. The artistic value of comics today is astounding compared to what was the best offered a few decades before. Could Jack Kirby, who, with Stan Lee, was one of the foremost comic book artists of all time, have competed in today's market? I think they would have been also rans.
There was a scene from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a doctor on board the Enterprise scolds his eight-year-old son Harry for running away from class and bumping into Commander Riker. "Everyone needs an understanding of basic calculus, whether they like it or not!" the father said.
That 1988 episode shows the crux of our society today. What was once considered advanced work is now baseline understanding to function.
I saw this myself in my first days of university. I had embarked on an engineering/computer science double degree program in 1993. I loved computers. I had just acquired my first computer four months before. I thought programming would be a great field to get into as a sidebar to engineering. What I discovered was that the computer science professor in the "introductory" class expected everyone taking that class to have been programming for several years already, and to have a fundamental understanding of things like "operator," "syntax," "variable" and the like. If you hadn't been coding long before you stepped into that classroom, you were doomed. That was my first and last comp sci class. I just barely passed it.
I imagine this occurs in many fields. Can you imagine how much knowledge a doctor has to know today compared to 30 years ago, with all the new drugs, treatments, rare diseases and the like?
Is there a limit to how much we can expect people to learn, or be able to do?
Remember when the four-minute mile was a feat to be celebrated? Now it's ho-hum. In the men's 100 metre race, seven of the eight runners in the finals of the 2012 London games were sub-10 seconds. In Barecelona in 1992, only the gold medalist was sub-10 seconds, and just by 0.04 seconds. By that measure, six of the runners in London, if they had travelled back individually in a time machine to Barcelona, could have won gold. Put another way, the gold medallist in Barcelona would have come in seventh in London, just 20 years later.
Will we reach the limit where there is simply no more we can do, that we can't cram any more into our brains, that our abilities as a species cannot go any further? When I see pencil sketches of junior high kids today compared to what was the best in the comic industry a few decades ago, one wonders what these children will be able to do with that talent down the road.
Our children today may make what vexed our grandparents seem like child's play in the future.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
