Thought Balloons by Don MacPherson "Rebel scum" There was a story in the paper the other week about how all but one of the schools in the local district are now allowing smoking on school grounds. Even though it is illegal for anyone under the age of 19 to smoke 'round these here parts, school administrators feared that teens would place themselves in harm's way in order to have a puff... near traffic I suppose. I thought back to my high-school years. I thought of the kids who smoked, huddled around the periphery of the school. Those kids didn't want to have a safe or even comfortable place on school grounds to smoke. In addition to getting a nicotine fix, they wanted to snub their noses at authority. They were non-conformists. They were out there to be cool. The situation made me think of comics and their readers. Comic books -- even those we fans consider "mainstream" -- are well outside of the mainstream. Comics lurk on the edge of pop culture. Writers and artists toil away, creating a wide variety of stories that go, in the grand scheme of things, unnoticed. Even if every copy of the first printing of The Dark Knight Strikes Back #1 was read by a different individual, that still only represents 175,000 readers, give or take a few hundred. Now imagine the number of people who have rented Pauly Shore's Jury Duty over the years. Pauly Shore. Mainstream comic books are not mainstream. Some mainstream comic-book characters are. That's it. We are outside, in the cold -- or the cold shoulder -- while the rest of the entertainment world is inside, toasty warm in the algebra or shop class of life. Phht. Who wants to be in class anyway? Do you think that if we were in the mainstream, we'd have had Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's unrestrained modern Western, Preacher? Remember, we're talking about a comic book that incorporated interspecies sex on more than one occasion. What would the PTA have said about armadillo sodomy? A vision of massive book burnings comes to mind. If Sean McKeever and Mike Norton's The Waiting Place were in the mainstream, imagine how much influence non-creative, self-important executive types would have sway over the story and characters. And what would become of Troy Nixey's Trout? In the mainstream, it would be inundated with bright colors, filled with cute kids who accept the title character for who he is, all packaged together to lure in the crowd that digs on Nickelodeon's Rugrats. Trout cereal. Trout Band-Aids. Trout bedsheets. Sure, sure... there's plenty of corporate influence in comics. Superman and Batman are carefully guarded, and we've listened to news and rumors about interference with The Authority with interest and disappointment. Marvel Comics cancelled a number of series -- even quality books -- because those stories and characters were not consistent with a broader direction that was planned. But comics -- whether they're published by the big boys, the small press and independents -- remain on the periphery, the outer rim... the edge. The edge may not be the safest place, or the most stable. But in many ways, life out here is free. We can experiment. We can have our private jokes, those little nuggets of information that only we can appreciate. We can break the rules. Pass over the Zippo, will you? Don MacPherson can cause heart and lung disease, is addictive and can harm the baby during pregnancy. Email Don MacPherson comments about this column, or discuss it on the Fourth Rail message board.