Comics and me...

My first encounter with comics was in the old library near my house. They had a bin full of them. It was love at first sight--mostly because they had my beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in comic form. I was all of 8. These comics were darker then the TV show, and they had women and lizards and mad science.

My mom hated them. She never let me check them out--though looking back I can't really blame her; the TMNT comics were dark, and they swore. A lot. I suspect she also didn't see the point in me checking them out. Comics, she told me, weren't for girls. And besides, these certainly weren't for someone my age.

I still read them, I just had to do it there while she was helping my younger brothers pick out their books. I won't say I was hooked yet, not really. I just liked the Ninja Turtles.

Forward several years. I've moved. I'm in middle school and more and more comics are cartoon shows. My favorite television show is X-Men, followed by Spider-Man. My favorite videotape is the old Plastic Man from the late 70's. I'm still not reading comics, but I know a lot about the characters and the stories. The Adventures of Batman and Superman are starting to instill a deep love for those characters as well.

My guy friends are big into comics, and I know enough about them to join in the conversations. I'm not reading the comics--not for girls, after all--and by this time I can tell. I am starting to get body-shy and the half-naked women on the front racks at my local shop made me vaguely uncomfortable. The local shop is also a porn shop. My mom didn't like us going in there. My local library doesn't carry that sort of thing, and I believe them that comics are a lesser form.

I still love the characters though.

High School. I need a job and one of my best friends says that his store needs more workers, desparately. He works at the local comics shop. Yes, the one that also sells porn. See, this is the year that Pokemon took the states by storm. The comic shop is being over run by soccer moms trying to buy Pokemon for thier 6 yr olds. The comic shop's employees--stereotypes all--need some fresh faces, need some people who can assure the new customer base that the shop isn't creepy. That a comic shop that sells porn and sports paraphanalia and role-playing games is their kind of shop too. And I know comics, sort of. I know Pokemon--I'm just starting to discover this...Japanese Anime. I know enough sci-fi and fantasy nerds that I'm not weirded out by the staff.

I'm hired on the spot when I come in to drop off my application.

I re-discover comics. I fall in love with Marvel, and decide that I'm probably not a DC girl--even though I love Batman. I start collecting The "What If" series that Marvel put out to make their writers giggle. I decide that my managers habit of collecting comics with weddings in them is hilarious, and start collecting comics with the "L'il X-Men," exactly what they sound like. Yes, those comics are funny.

They come up more then you'd think.

I love comics. I love the absurd stories, the strange costumes. I imagine myself into the worlds and I want to have super powers.

But these books are still not for me. I just enjoy them. They dont realy have beginnings or middles of ends, they keep going, eternally until it all falls apart, everything meaningless, even death and victory. I prefer my books to have some pretense of meaning something. And I'm still in a comic shop that sells porn--which I'm not supposed to even touch because I'm only 15. Which I find stupid--because the drawn women are not wearing much, and the statues are blatently sexual. Immersed in comics at this time, I can see the sexism. I may not be working with the porn, but I do see some of it. These comics are often the same thing, poses, costumes, all. They are fantasies for the male part of our species. I don't have many women that I really admire--partly because even the ones that I love are not written as consistantly and as well as the boys.

A year later. Still working at the comic shop. I'm still into comics, but I'm more firmly an anime fan. I go to CA for a 5 week course on shakespere and improvisational acting. I'm on my own for the first time in my life. In between classes, I'm bored and lonely and I'm exploring the area. I find a comic shop.

It's just a comic shop. More then that--it carries more then the Big 2 and some indie comics. It carries...manga. Comics from Japan. Comics that aren't costumed superheroes, comics with women as the main characters. New stories, linear stories. Full stories with beginnings and middles and ends. Novels. The regular stuff is there too, but I start to experiment. I discover some new favorites.

College. New comic shop. Manga has not yet come to the midwest in any volume. I request my favorite series gets ordered. Jimmy, the owner, agrees--after all, most comic shops would like more women customers, and I said that women liked these (in a few years he will tell me that manga outsells everything in his shop, and he's doubled his custmer base because women come in and buy things). I ask him for some recommendations. I'm pretty solidly into the indie comics, and I told him I don't collect monthlies--I prefer trade paperbacks.

He asks me if I've read Sandman. Or Bone.

New worlds open up. Comics-as-genre dies. Comics-as-medium to tell stories is born. Comics become capable of literature, of moving me. I savored each volume I bought, and drew out the anticipation to 1 book per semester--until the end, where I had to buy the last three in quick sucession, unable to wait any longer. I cried at the end. I sat on the hard, tiled, cold floor of my dorm room and read the entire 2000 page brick of Bone, unconcerned about the class I'd be asleep through, oblivious to the pain in my back.

Now. I care deeply about comics. I still love my superheroes, but I'm constantly looking for new stories. I try to keep up with what's happening in Marvel and DC, but mostly I stick to the comics that gain critical notoriety. I still don't read monthlies. My new local comic shop is one of the best in the nation, they proudly display their Eisner Award and keep proving how much they deserve it. I write comics. I feel that some of the best peices of literature I've read to date, the stuff that's made me think and changed my outlook on the world the most has been told through a medium that most people assume is "just for kids," or "just for boys." The major studios are not doing a whole lot to change these views.

Still, though, I really want to have super powers.