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Nabokov‘s interest in comic strips was not limited to his childhood. Axel Rex, protagonist of Laughter in the Dark, is a cartoonist, the creator of Cheepy. Bend Sinister also features an invented comic strip (Etermon) and Speak, Memory pays its coded tribute to Otto Soglow‘s strip The Little King. Alfred Appel, whose 1974 Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (New York, Oxford UP) remains the best introduction to Nabokov’s use of images from popular culture, surveys his American comic strip allusions (pp. 74-85). Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake figure in Lolita, as does Lo’s favorite strip Penny. Appel also quotes a personal conversation in which Nabokov mused: “Dennis the Menace doesn’t look like his father. Could he be illegitimate?” (31). When he ponders writing a letter about it to The Herald Tribune, “he is dissuaded by Vèra who remarks that the paper had not printed his earlier letter about plot inconsistencies in Rex Morgan.”

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I started reading comic books that were published in the 1980s, when I was about 20 years old, and they all dealt with repression in Franco’s Spain. These were comic books that were published in Spain. At the time, they were sort of the equivalent of the underground comics in the Sixties in America. They were very anarchic, very against the system, against the establishment, and a lot of them dealt with the situation of postwar Spain. There was one in particular that influenced The Devil’s Backbone more than Pan’s Labyrinth that dealt with an orphanage in postwar Spain; that was called Paracuellos [by Carlos Giménez, 1981].

This one is too easy, I know, but this series needs to live on as more than just a cheap ploy to lure unsuspecting readers from a barely related (at best) “blog-a-thon”—if only so I can sleep at night. Sometimes you have to go to blog with the post you have, not the post you want to have.

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In his final years, Sagan recalled a “blustery fall day” when he was about age five, looking out the living room window at Lower New York Bay. The water was choppy and the sun was about to set. His mother came by the window and they gazed toward the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side of the sea, World War II was beginning. “There are people fighting out there, killing each other,” she told him. Carl replied: “I know. I can see them.” She fired back: “No, you can’t. They’re too far away.”

This seemingly trivial incident gnawed at Sagan. His adoring mother had contradicted him! He later wrote: “How could she know whether I could see them or not? … Squinting, I had thought I’d made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and dueling with swords as they did in my comic books.”

In honor of Carl Sagan, who died ten years ago today.