ATOMIC CITY JOE

What?! You say comics are kids’ stuff? Strike up a conversation with store clerk, Joe Turner, fount of comics knowledge, and shortly you'll be lobbing the ball back and forth about TV media, digital innovation, history, music, art, film, race and culture. At that time, immediately, you realize, slam dunk!, comic books connect them allnot bad for an orphan art form with a chip on its shoulder.

What we have now is how we got here - that's history

"What's more important than what we have now is how we got here - that's history," says Joe, like as not reflecting the perspective of his adopted mentor James Burke. Comics all in all have great potential in spite of the "us and them," chip-on-the-shoulder stance that was built in at a core level, believes Turner. He wants "both sides to talk more" and break away from insularity and non-inclusion. Atomic City Joe believes passionately that, "Sequential graphics story telling is the most successful form of communication we’ve devised…goes back to the cave wall…mythologizing our real world stories."

"There's a lot more empty calories today," says Joe, referring to some of the slick, digitally produced, violent graphics filling comic book shelves now versus the genuine terror of before days. Probably the most subversive comics artist most of us already know about was Walt Disney. If you put the right lenses on you could decode reams of messages embedded in Mickey Mouse's antics. Young Joe Turner read the chilling episode where Mickey joins the Foreign Legion nevertheless, first, has to endure severe hazing from government operatives who test his endurance and resolve in the face of what we know today as rendition and waterboarding.

David Galernter, computer scientist, foresees all content becoming a "lifestream" we dip into to put it more exactly than the "fuzzy nothing" of chaotically proliferating web connections we have today. And that's a good thing, more accessible conceptually, as Galernter explains in "Rethinking the Digital Future," a recent Wall Street Journal interview.