Parenting & Family Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem’s sentence reads like a modest origin story, but it’s really a quiet manifesto about taste and allegiance. The pivot word is “wandered”: he doesn’t “reject” superheroes, he drifts from them, as if the mainstream was a neighborhood he outgrew rather than a villain he had to slay. That choice matters because it frames cultural movement as porous and curious, not performatively oppositional. It’s the voice of someone who knows subcultures can become just another set of rules.

“Underground comics” carries a whole freight of American counterculture: formal experimentation, taboo content, DIY circulation, the idea that drawing can be literature and that lowbrow genres can be used for high-wire personal expression. Lethem’s subtext is that the real education wasn’t a syllabus, it was learning which mediums gave him permission to be strange. When he adds, almost offhandedly, “I was an art student,” he’s signaling discipline and craft - the institutional counterweight to the romantic myth of the naturally gifted kid.

Then he doubles back to childhood: “drawing a lot as a kid.” It’s disarmingly simple, but it connects the underground to something pre-ideological. Before the cultural arguments about “serious” art versus “genre,” there’s hand-to-paper pleasure. That’s Lethem’s broader project in miniature: collapsing the hierarchy between pop and literary, insisting that the continuum from superhero panels to experimental comics to novels isn’t a betrayal of seriousness, it’s how seriousness gets made.