Boris loves his ’50s comic books
By Boris Vallejo – I grew up in Lima, Peru, in the Roaring ’50s. At that time, in that country, the idea of television was almost science fiction. What did people do when they came back from work, you ask? What the heck did kids do when they returned home from school, you ponder? Well, people read. Kids read. I read. Books were my friends. All kinds of books. The classics, adventure, mystery, children’s books. And then there were comic books.
I clearly remember my first contact with comic books. I had been in bed for a couple of days with the flu. My father came back from work with Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy and EC’s Tales from the Crypt. My brother, being the older one, had first choice. He took the horror book. It didn’t matter to me; I hadn’t ever seen one or the other. I seriously doubt that my brother had, but he wanted to exercise his rights as eldest of the clan anyhow. I loved that Dick Tracy book. I thought the art was kind of weird (I already considered myself an artist, even at that early age), but I loved it anyway. I read it and reread it many times, and then I traded it for my brother’s Tales from the Crypt. I thought the art was weirder and, on top of that, scary. So I loved that comic book even more than the Dick Tracy.
Jack Davis became one of my two idols, second only to Jascha Heifetz. (For those of you too young to know, Jack Davis was, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest comic artists of that era. And for those of you who only listen to rock and etc., Jascha Heifetz was, in the opinion of most people in the know, the greatest violinist of any era.)
Years later, I arrived in the USA with a few samples of my work, $80 in my pocket, and not a word of English in my brain. Once again, comic books were my friends. Comic books were easier to understand than television. Comic books were easier to understand than people. (They still are.) Comic books were more than friends; they were my teachers as they opened my mind into another language.
I am asked, often, where my ideas for paintings come from. As much as I am frequently tempted to mention a little store in Newark, New Jersey, that sells ideas of all sizes for all occasions, I’d rather tell you that I firmly believe that reading develops your imagination more than anything that I can think of. When I read, I can see things in my mind better than most people can on a television screen. I can forward or reverse. I can freeze a frame and change it in my head. I firmly believe that I can do that because my brain learned to picture the things that I was reading.
We live in an amazing world, with incredible technological advances. Television is fun. Computers are wonderful. But let us not forget our friendly books.
Imagination is a terrible thing to waste.
