Fiery Nostalgia

[Warning: If you are using dial-up, I'm going to blow out your browser with all the images in this post. You Have Been Warned.]

Aunt Kathie showed up at our door on Saturday to make the delightful offer of taking the boys for an hour or two over to the local fire station, where they were having safety demonstrations. Denver and Poncho, like all boys, are deeply in love with large trucks, especially those with flashing lights and loud sirens, so they could barely be bothered to say goodbye on their way out the door.

When they returned, they bore with them some free kid-oriented materials handed out at the demonstrations. Among the coloring books and stickers was something that sent me spinning back in time to the fourth grade and the cold, aniseptic beige auditorium of Mary Tone Elementary School. If you were ever present for a school fire prevention presentation, you may remember this (you can click any image below for the much larger version I spent hours scanning and uploading):



I knew that this was the same cover I had seen on my copy from 1982. And I was right--the Forest Service hasn't put out a new copy of this comic since 1969. I was just as delighted to find that the comic within the cover was still the same one I had read those many years ago. From the perspective of a score of years later, however, I found some aspects of the comic queer and amusing. Let's poke about a bit inside, shall we?









The first page opens with a narration from a large bird of prey, which is pretty cool, I must admit:



A few things struck me about this page (and Devin, you are required to chime in here with your professional comical opinion on these matters at some point). The whole comic has a strange, stilted feel as if it were designed and drawn by a Forest Service employee with some drawing talent but no actual knowledge of comic conventions--but the style is common to all "educational" comics that I remember. The cheapness of the production here is visible in the paper quality (if you could feel this image, it would be printed on that cheap newspaper-type stock common to lowest-common-denominator printing) and that fact that the drawings are so simple. The coloring isn't even very good--note the bleed around the eagle's head in the third panel, for instance.

Where did that map come from? It only appears in that one panel, and it's floating in a powder blue void. Our narrator must have ceased his flight long enough to point to it--maybe the other shots are a slide show presented by the eagle, and this is one of his visual aids. The other fun part about the map is its utter uselessness in pinpointing what the heck he's talking about: it's just a big polygon with a dot in the middle stating "Capitan Mtn." How is that useful?

You'll note that each sentence here ends in an exclamation point. This holds true for every sentence in the entire comic. Perhaps the eagle is shouting the whole time--or else an amateur letterer thought this would make the speeches more moving. I have to give the writer grammatical kudos, though--despite the presence of a few run-ons (which we can forgive him, as we suspect this may be dramatic license), he remembers to use opening quotations before every line because it's all the eagle's narration.

We suddenly switch to trout-cam in the last panel here. Not sure whose perspective this is supposed to be from. The eagle is clearly omniscient and omniperceptive.



In the intervening pages, a fire starts from unknown (though unquestionably thoughtless human) causes and burns down the whole world. Lots of animals pose dramatically before yellowy-red flames that bleed color all over the place. The story of twenty-four brave firefighters who lived through an hour-long firestorm on a rockslide is recounted. Oddly, like 95% of all the panels in this thing, all information comes from the eagle's narration--there is one character who speaks a single line in the first ten pages of this comic, and there are perhaps four other examples in the whole thing. An oddly stilted style, but it saves on expensive word bubbles, I guess.

Anyway, the firefighters discover the burned cub pictured here in the smoldering ruins and "rescue" him. They end up naming him after Smokey, who's already a fire-prevention mascot--meaning that the whole "True Story of Smokey Bear" thing is a disgusting lie. This is a bear named Smokey, not the mascot himself.

Does anyone else remember him being called "Smokey the Bear"? I hadn't realized "Bear" was his surname; perhaps he's related to the Berenstein Bears and that Teddy fellow.

Once again, a useless map. This one, however, has an additional useless reference scale so as to allow measurement of the floating shape.

I love that they have to point out that it wouldn't be fun to camp in the burned-out charcoal skeleton forest. And perhaps most moving to children is that the "water producing and storage capacity of the land" is "badly hurt!"

"His feet were carefully bandaged!" Thrills! Excitement!



The comic continues for several pages to chronicle the so-called "Smokey" and his meteoric rise to stardom--the drugs, the parties, the women. Eventually the achieves the dizzying heights shown here: he's so famous that most of the posters don't even feature any words. His very image is enough to remind the world to stop burning down forests, damn you!

The kid in the second panel has the classic Michelangelo pose; today he might be suspended for his overt demonstration of religious dogma in the public school. It's a bizarrely unnatural pose, unless the boy has his arm in a splint under that sleeve. He seems far too eurphoric upon seeing the image of Smokey for it to be entirely moral. The kid behind him has a casual serial-killer smile and clearly here sees his moment to strike, as his simple-minded classmate is enraptured by the sight of a drawing of a bear. He, too, sports an affected mannequin pose.

That must have been a super exciting interview to listen to on the radio. Why even have the bear show up? A fat guy making bear noises would have been more entertaining. The great thing about these is that they're almost certainly modeled on publicity shots that the Forest Service was probably sending out in the fifties--which might also explain why the family in the last panel is watching an antique television. Wouldn't you love to spend an evening with them? They smile grimly at a static image on the screen. Their walls are black, their decor is in various shades of lilac, and they have some strangely communist cubic art on the wall. I feel queasy just looking at them.

Also, where are those kids sitting? To achieve that kind of proximity to their parents, Dad must have had his legs truncated in the war, and poor Mom is just a torso surgically attached to the couch. Perhaps that explains her expression.



One of the big clues as to the age of this piece is the, "Soon he will get a new home in the Washington Zoo" reference. If it were current, he'd have been homeless for fifty years. Note the other non-famously named bears looking on at Smokey from behind the fence; this protects Smokey from the other inmates, who might shiv him in the cafeteria just for the rep.

I also find it jarring to go from the "realistic" bear in the zoo in the first panel to the anthropomorphized Smokey in the next panel. It also appears that he's hammering his poster onto the same tree in his enclosure at the zoo--the branch hanging down is nearly identical. How they expect Smokey to spread his message by only putting up notices in his holding pen is unexplained. Also, why is he using a tack hammer to nail up a poster to a tree? And why do all the bears in that poster clearly have breasts?

The third panel is a picture-within-a-picture, as Smokey is making the same gesture in the real world as he is in the poster itself. I like that there are no words to the image, just the vaguely accusatory hand gesture. "Get it, mankind? Get it? Jerks."

I'm unsure about the contractor in the fifth panel. Did any worker ever wear a fedora on a construction site? The chunk cut out of the plank he's carrying looks far more accidental than intentional, and though I'm no carpenter, I don't think those windows are framed out correctly, unless they're building a church. This looks to me more like a photo op for the head of the firm that drew up the plans for the house, trying to look thrusting and purposeful, a real "hands-on" kind of boss who understands his men; after the shot he gets out of the apron as fast as possible and drives his Mercedes down to the club for a three martini lunch.

"How they burn up timber that could have been used to make homes--perhaps a new home for you..." Way to bring it home to the reader. Now every poor kid knows why he has to live in a run-down efficiency apartment--some bastard burned down the forest whose trees were meant to build him a house. That's the kind of thing that can lead to riots.

What piece of furniture is that? A sideboard? A kitchen cabinet? The woman looks as though she's about to give Humphrey Bogart there (with the super-thick inking lines on his shirt) a backhanded swat on the rump. What did he do? She also gets her art from the same gallery as the Manson Family from the last page.

That kid is not reading a comic book. It's some kind of very large-scale graph paper; perhaps he's perusing the maps of "Capitan Mtn." and "Burn Out" that are all the rage these days.

Remember, kids: the number-one bad thing about forest fires is that they are a setback to Industry!



First panel: the River Styx. You can just spot the ferryman making his way to his skiff on the one piece of eerily green ground.

Clearly, people in the fifties grazed sheep in the woods. You might wonder why they don't just move over to the next hill, which is verdant green, but then you realize the terrifying truth: There's a flood coming. There's no way that lake could swell up into the sky as it's doing here otherwise.

You're really supposed to just hold a match until it's "cold"? Why not dunk it in water, or grind it into the sand? Do you have to keep touching it, giving yourself multiple tiny blisters, until it's cold? And why has this hairy-armed lothario broken it in half? And why was he holding it like a cigarette in the first place? It's clearly still got some energy left, as it's radiating excess power as it's broken.

Another sign of the times here is that cigarette smoking is mentioned explicitly without any negative connotation. Today's version wouldn't even mention cigarettes, and if it did the message would surely be something like, "Like all right-minded humans, you should never, ever smoke a cigarette outside of a concrete bunker in your own home, you filthy monster." Here they're even allowing the reader to smoke (keeping in mind that the reader is an eight-year-old), as long as, when he tosses his butts on the ground, he grinds them out underfoot. Littering is still okay in Smokey's world--just another little jab at his arch-rival, Woodsey Owl. You can understand why he would be bitter--Woodsey is named after the forests that Smokey so loves, while the bear himself is named after the very agent of destruction he is trying to warn the world about. A cruel irony he doesn't fail to mention to his therapist in their twice-weekly sessions.

Yet another shot of Smokey putting up a poster of himself, only this time he appears to be giving the Black Power salute. Smokey has clearly let fame go to his head--look how delighted he is at his own visage. I don't think this is really about fighting fires anymore for Smokey; it's all about product placement and the corporate bosses back at the Department of the Interior.

We finally learn why this is all told by an eagle--sort of. Well, not really. But I don't think that pose is aerodynamically possible for a large bird, unless he's diving in to pluck out Smokey's sweet, sweet eyeballs.



The book begins and ends with these photo pages showing some of the old posters, and this one includes a letter from Smokey himself. He has abnormally small paws for a three hundred pound black bear.

The posters here are great. Again as a sign of the times, notice that two of the posters have overtly religious appeals: an explicit reference to God, and a shot of Smokey praying, for Petey Wheatey's sake. These are also the days when cigarettes have the casual, well-worn appelation of "smokes." Cheaper to print, anyway.

The "Good Outdoor Habits for Everyone" poster does indeed confirm the recommendation to "break your matches." What is this supposed to do? Does breaking them rob them of their magical flammability juice?

Note also, just below, a gaggle of Disney rejects venerating their fire-prevening god, Smokey the Slightly Embarrassed Floating Head.

In the note itself, youngsters are urged to warn their friends that "playing with matches is playing with fire." Isn't this why their friends are playing with matches in the first place? I'm not certain that the reference to a cliched colloquialism is going to get a chuckle from the average fourth grader. And, "Keeping careless use of fire out of the woods," is awfully clumsy syntax.

I can attest personally, though, that the "tiny 'play' campfire... left burning" reference is one worth heeding. As a kid who did exactly that and who burned out a sizeable chunk of our local forests as a result, I can aver that this warning is entirely useful. If only I had more carefully read the last page! I might have avoided a lot of heartache and certainly a litany of lectures from every fire prevention officer on the mountain.

If you've made it this far, congratulations. Consider yourself one of the few. I hope you've enjoyed this little journey and won't report me to the Forest Service for breach of copyright law. Good night, and stop setting fires!