This is a reflexive ethnography that interweaves a 1960s Midwest childhood with the culture of comic books and a critique of the 1960s and the nuclear family. My comic choices were more eclectic than my brother’s vast collection of Marvel, but both of us found in comics an escape from a strained childhood. The comic books, like all art, held meanings that were deeper than the pamphlet’s face value. What did this art form do for us? Certainly entertained, but even more. Becoming immersed in the lives of the characters, we were not alone. We lived lives balancing eggs on spoons, and we collected little pictured stories that offered clearer insights about family life than what the world was telling us
