There’s little else as bizarre as being a woman in a comic book shop. A hundred women can tell the story of how they walked into a comic shop only to have their racks checked out by snot-nosed, acne covered geeks, listened to a thousand inappropriate comments, and then felt dirty when they left. Those women lament about the pain of being a woman who likes comics, because we don’t have D-cups or gravity defying bras.
Thing of it is, I’ve never had that problem. I’m a geek, to the point that hanging out in the alternative music store is as natural to me as going to a skeezy book store for my comic fix. And believe me, I’ve done both often enough that I can claim to own a few CDs that no one else had ever heard of until I found them for sale on line. G-d bless the internet. I currently frequent a pretty nice shop, just down the street from leather shops and piercing joints, where the scent of patchouli overrides what I suspect is cannabis.
I’ve been going there for about five years, give or take, and never once have I felt harassed or oppressed for my gender. At first, I felt a little odd to wander around the hard core Manga, especially since it wasn’t what I was looking for. I don’t go all that often, since my one title is bi-monthly, and there’s a lot of down-time. On Tuesday, February 24th, I wandered in to see if I’d messed up my months. I found a missing chapter to my ‘Hunter: The Age of Magic’ collection and realized that they’d reorganized, again.
This prompted a half hour wasted, just wandering around and admiring the comic book world. In the back, where Manga and Anime had lived, there was now my beloved small press books. The most recent ‘Strangers in Paradise’ was still the last one I picked up, and the CSI based comics just weren’t interesting enough to bother with anymore. When you don’t give a shit how the story ends, you know it’s time to ignore the books. I toyed with the idea of going back to GI Joe, but my love of Scarlet and Snake-Eyes was gone and there was no resurrection. Same with ElfQuest, though I suspect if they re-release the graphic novels, I may pick the old ones up. Or not. It’s hard to say. The stories lost sometime after the big time-travel plot. Isn’t that always the case, though?
I walked to the new Manga/Anime section and found myself standing in front of the N section, without meaning too. My eyes drifted down and there I was, looking at a long lost friend. Ben Dunn’s ‘Ninja High School.’
I love comic books. When I was about seven, Dad sucked me into their glorious world of magic, mayhem and mystery. Before that, I’d read Tintin and Asterix, which are really graphic novels. Tintin is a little more deep than Asterix, but that’s all a matter of perspective. My love for Tintin, the boy reporter, centers around the fantasy I had to work for National Geographic. My picture taking skills suck, however, and I seem to be ruled more by imagination than knowledge most days.
Of course, Albert Einstein did say that imagination was more important that knowledge. I always understood that to mean that without our imagination, we’d have nowhere to place our knowledge. If it helps, I’m in my late twenties and I sill have trouble tying my shoes.
Comics aren’t just for kids. I’ve always said that and I always will. Comics aren’t cheap art and trashy stories that are the cotton candy of the written word: eaten and then forgotten. Comics can be as deep and meaningful as a James Joyce novel, and my father loves both. Many comics are pop-Americana, meaning nothing and telling us little. Classic Comics, the line that produced comic versions of great literature, are as educational as the trimmed down little classics I read in elementary school.
Is there anything wrong in reading a comic version of “Moby Dick” as a child? I read and fell in love with Melville’s most famous work as a senior in High School, but looking back I think I wasn’t prepared, mentally, for the complications and depths as a young girl. But I did read the Classic Comic of the book, to get a summary of the main plot points. It’s like Cliff Notes. You can use them to ground yourself in the main of the story, freeing your mind to absorb the intricacies of the details.
There’s always something lost in the translations. Too many people are used to movies being written to be movies, and books for books. Anytime someone tries to blend the two, a good portion of the original media’s fans get up in arms and scream. Seriously, have you ever read the books ‘based on the hit movie?’ They’re almost always crap. To trim a novel into a movie, or a comic book, you lose some of the detail. That’s not a bad thing, in the long run. If a movie interests a kid in looking deeper into a topic, then it’s sparked their imagination. Movie and comic versions of books can help people who aren’t visually inclined to see the world. At least as one person interpreted it.
Most of the best comics were meant to be comics from the day they were born. One of the ones my Dad and I liked, but most people thought was crazy, was ‘Ninja High School.’ ‘Ninja High School,’ or NHS, was a beloved darling of mine when I was about eleven. It was bewildering mockery of all that was Manga/Anime. It ripped off everyone and everything, didn’t bother with reality, and introduced an Archie-esque love triangle. We’d picked up the first story in a graphic novel format, and I embraced it with all my heart. NHS, much like the TV show ‘Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,’ was a self-mocking, pop-referential dabbling in poking fun of ourselves. Where ‘Buffy’ went further into the whole ‘high school is hell!’ concept, NHS remained pop-funny.
One sequence involved the ZetraMen (a Power Rangers rip-off) using their powers to defeat evil. The ZetraMen, given their power by the super steam of Prof. Steamhead, had the powers of earth (Red), wind (Yellow) and water (blue) . In one memorable fight scene, ZetraMan Yellow turned his back to the bad guy, posed in a stereotypical Manga/Anime fight pose only backwards, and then the panel had one word as a sound effect and the bad guy falling over. The word was ‘Fart.’
Yeah, it’s a fart joke, but the thing of it is that it’s been over a decade and I can still see ZetraMan Yellow posing, doing a mock Crane move that Daniel did in ‘The Karate Kid,’ one foot pointing out and the arms up, and then the long, drawn out ‘Faaaaaaarrt!’ effect. Then there’s his teammates in fetal positions, looking like the smell killed them too. Hey, if you had the power of wind, you can’t say you wouldn’t do it!
As a pre-teen, comics remained one of the many ways I bonded with my father. We lived together in a nice house in California. The roof leaked, the landlord was ripping us off, and for a while Dad was breaking even to the point that coffee money was scrounged for from the change jar. But I had him and a weekend of fun involved the beach with our lunches and snacks, Barkley the dog, and a rousing game of stick ball. I credit my ability with a baseball bat to those hours Dad spent on my hitting.
Every Friday, Dad went to Thrill Books, Comics and Games, and got me comics. At first it was Archie. For a while it was X-Men. Always it was Batman and GI Joe. In the mid 1980s, we found ElfQuest. Technically it was printed up by Marvel, the same people who gave us X-Men and GI Joe, but this was nothing like the cartoonish Joes or the uber-political X-Men. ElfQuest was fantasy the way I’d always thought it should be told. There was pain and suffering, but hope and dreams. Love was found, lost, strained, and sometimes not enough. Now that I’m a little older, I compare it to the X-Men and I see the similarities. I see why Marvel decided that these elves should work as their own title.
I read ElfQuest consistently up until college, when I fell off the comic bandwagon. By that time, I’d over dosed on the entire genre. Screw the X-Men, forget GI Joe, I don’t care what happens to the damn elves. It wasn’t for four years that I stepped back into the show.
I still have a lot of Tintin comics, and I skim Asterix, though I won’t buy the latter. All the DC ‘dark’ comics (they call it their Vertigo line) I used to read has been trimmed down to one, which ended after 25 issues (‘Hunter: The Age of Magic’). Pretty much the only comic I buy now is ‘Strangers in Paradise.’
Comics were a me and Dad thing. We understood the art was as valid as a Broadway musical (which is supposedly ‘low class’ when compared to opera).
NHS was low class a lot of the time. It never really aimed past fun and in-jokes. It rarely explained everything, and there was a lot of the bizarre inside it’s pages. And unlike the Archie world, it remained funny forever. A comic filled with in jokes can be draining, but for the years I read NHS, I never fell out of the loop or like I was reading it just to finish the damn story.
When I started getting back on the comic book shelf, I dabbled with DC’s Vertigo line again, finished up the ‘Sandman’ stories, picked up the ‘Books of Magic’ reprints, fooled around with ‘Hellblazer’ and then looked at the super-heros. Batman and Robin had always been my heroes, so I picked one up and had to put it down. Same with X-Men, GI Joe, and every other super story. They were so convoluted, twisted and confusing that I couldn’t see why I’d bothered with them in the first place.
Clutching Tim Hunter, Francine and Kachoo to my chest, I made my sale and escaped.
I never even considered NHS. Not once. I saw it when I picked up ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ on their American reprinting, but I passed on by. Why had I stopped reading NHS? The story line had meandered. Ben Dunn had stopped doing the art. I’d grown up. That’s what I told myself at least.
On that Tuesday, as I looked down at comic 100, I picked it up to see the beautiful art by Ben Dunn and a story that made no sense. Jeremy, the ‘hero’ of the book, had picked his girl, and his arch-rival finally had his true love. Everyone was happy, life was better, and yet the story felt forced. I put it back on the shelf and picked up the ‘Perfect Memory’ book, which was a recap of the comics. Since it had everything about all the comics I’d not bought, I decided this was a good way to gain closure.
The Perfect Memory was riff with comments by Ben Dunn himself. As I skimmed through the jokes and sarcasm, I felt in tune once more with the man who created the Quagmire Koala Combat Cheerleading Team. He too had felt dispassion at his series, that he couldn’t take the story any where useful.
The stories had been told, and his heart was no longer in it.
Nor was mine.
I no longer read graphic novels, and perhaps that saved from feeling as pretentious as that phrase has always sounded. I don’t read the same trashy novels I used to, nor the like-minded magazines. I don’t watch sitcoms.
We’re all creatures of passion. That’s part of human nature. The part of me that had, at one point, been absorbed by the world of comics was gone, for ever. In fact, much of what defined me as a teen was so far and away different from the me of today, that I double take when my memories show me my teen-self. I hid in the world of fantasy and myth, I inhaled comics and cartoons.
All I can remember today are weekends at the beach with my father. Him reading a book, probably something by James Joyce, and listening to NPR on the radio. Me not-tanning and reading my comics while I drank apple juice. As Dad and I changed, the comics and swimsuits changed, but the beach remained the same. I was the one who broke the chain, first by going away to summer camp, then by choosing boarding school.
Every week, like clockwork, Dad mailed me my comics. Usually he wrote letters that made me love him all the more. Like how he found our cat, Blackjack, having a beer at the local watering hole, because he missed me. I knew what Dad meant. Then the comics stopped being weekly, but monthly. It was a mutual decision. I just didn’t care as much and Dad knew it. Finally, when I went to college, it ended completely.
Two years later I moved back in with Dad, in Chicago, and we went comic shopping. It was fun, but it wasn’t the same and we both knew it. Then he left Chicago and I remained. I’ve been in Chicago for eight years come June, but only the last four have really been filled with comics again. Part of that is due to a trip I made back to California to see my mother. It was a surprise, so I stayed at Dad’s even though he wasn’t there. When I pulled his bed out of the closet, I found all my old comics.
I read many of them, even considered taking a few home. Instead, I settled for liberating some of my old toys and a blanket. The comics were his as much as mine, and it wasn’t right to take them away.
With Dad in Japan now, things are very different. I keep saying I’m going to go back and get my comics, to get my childhood memories. But every time I say it out loud, I want to leave them there. If I bring them to Chicago, they won’t be what Dad and I had. They won’t be an ‘us’ thing anymore. It will be my memories, but I’ll feel like I stole them from him.
I know I should just suck it up, fly out with my girlfriend, pack it up, and road trip back. Maybe I will do that next year. But I can’t do it now. Especially having read the NHS Perfect Memory, with the memories of my youth wrapped around the comic book world.
The young teen me looks back at me in my mirror today, asking me when I traded in comedy for sarcasm? She wants to know why I don’t watch sitcoms or read Archie. She wants to know why we don’t live close to the only man we’ve ever loved.
All I can tell her is that, much like a comic book, when the story is told, it’s done. You can re-read the comic a hundred times, but once the initial blast of art and funky fusion is gone, the magic never returns.
To her, I can only suggest she pick up Tintin and read the Black Island. Remember how she and her father laughed at the way the translator wrote out the accents. Read the Castafiore Emerald. Forget how later on, the overly comedic Jollyon Wagg arrived to steal the show, ala Cousin Oliver on the Brady Bunch. Live in the now of the comic book world and forget how the stories will seem less fun in a decade.
I will continue to be the girl in the comic book store who’s never harassed by the nerds. I will continue to experiment with my comic diet and try and find new magic. The days of reading comics just for jollies is gone for me, and I suspect it will never return.
But any time I miss Dad, I’m going to pick up Tintin in Tibet and smile over the story of true friendship and family. I’ll remember playing at being a wolfrider with my friends in the forest preserve. I may even watch some Anime to reflect on the child I was. In all those games, I see myself and my father.
We’ll always have comics.