I’m a Baby Bird Comic Nerd and I Just Got My Wings!
I’m a rare bird in the slow-changing and challenging comics industry: a middle-aged newbie female reader.
I’m a noob! Sometimes I feel dumb then I get over it. I ask a lot of questions. I get recommendations. I browse shelves that are very confusing My new fandom and plucky attitude can be attributed to friends like Edward Ward, GeekGirlCon and bloggers like Jill Pantozzi.
It all started with Ed. He had a dream a few years back of creating a mobile comic book store called Paper Windows Bookseller. It was genius. He sadly didn’t get past the start-up phase but for a short time he was hand-delivering to a small horde of dedicated clients. Over many previous years Ed had tried and failed to tempt me into loving comics. I literally didn’t understand how they worked, how the panels flowed, or where to dive in. I can be very stubborn. In retrospect, this illustrates a huge challenge the industry of comics is attempting to overcome: accessibility. We’ll touch more on that again in a moment.
Ed’s persistence paid off and so did the novelty of the “Comic Book Delivery Guy” showing up at my office. He was way better than the sandwich dude and was often the highlight of my busy day. He also created a book group to discuss graphics novels. One of the first books we discussed, Criminal: Last of the Innocent, was my game changer. Everything up to that point was fun but forgettable. I swapped my comic thinking from “playing along” to “how do I read more.” With this particular book, my noob brain clicked and churned and whirled at the complexity and richness of story and how it relied entirely on the format of graphic art to tell this layered tale. AH HA! High five, bro.
GeekGirlCon and ladies like Erica McGillivray and Jennifer K. Stuller gave me the extra push to finding the right stories. Plus, the convention invites the kind of creators who gave this thrill-joy feminist a reason to keep trying. Erica also recommended one of my first series, The Runaways. Thanks, Erica. I now want a dinosaur sidekick named Old Lace for cosplay adventures. Rawr.
Man, that was a lot of effort just to get me to enjoy a goddamn comic. In his book Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture author Rob Salkowitz dives into the reasons why in more detail. He describes difficulty in finding access points due to a complicated and convoluted decade-long story arcs in the hero genre, the restrictive distribution model and the “odor of overgrown adolescent males.” He also describes the transmedia trend that is bringing in new readers. You see, the very first book I actually bought from Ed was a tie in to the television show Castle. Suck it, haters. It was good. It’s proof that it works, too. Now I’m on to meatier tales like Sandman and Saga.
My new-found passion can also attributed to a comic shop that popped up in my neighborhood of Capitol Hill. Nick of Phoenix Comics and Games planted himself in what is occasionally referred to as the Gay Ghetto of Seattle. His store isn’t a nightmare to browse because it’s well organized and not over cluttered. It’s on my way home. He recognizes me and I always run into a friend from around the hill. I can send him emails to ask questions like “what comes next” with a picture of a book I just finished and he doesn’t treat me like an idiot. Plus, get this: I started my very own subscription file. I had to google how subscriptions work but I think I got it down. Um, yeah, all I had to do was ask for one. Dur. I need to stop by and visit, like, right now.
Comics are now my quiet reprieve from a fast paced lifestyle. My last real vacation was spent on my friend’s couch in Houston, reading comics and drinking buckets of cheap wine. Denton Tripton, the editor of IDW, suggested I try Locke and Key. He’d actually donated many issues of X-Files Season 10 to my Burl-X-Files show so I thought I was doing some sort of payback gesture by picking up a copy. Nope. I definitely will keep reading that series. Comics truly are the gift that keeps on giving. Thanks, Denton.
On that trip, after Locke and Key, I finished what I had on hand of Saga. Then I made my friend read it. Then we got in the car and drove in circles until we found Bedrock Comics and bought more issues. A few weeks later, for Bechdel Test Burlesque, I gave the cast copies of the first collection of issues as a thank you. Many have given me the gift of learning to enjoy comics so it seems appropriate to pass it on.
