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edenfallingI don't remember exactly when I encountered comic books as a concept. I know it must have been via my friend Cat, because she was the one who introduced me to... oh, pretty much any form of pop culture up until I was maybe twelve years old, at which point Vicky began to explore her own tastes and I started borrowing her books and sort of idly watching her shows. The part I remember most dramatically is when Cat talked me into watching the old X-Men cartoon on Fox, back around 1992. That was, quite literally, the first television I watched that wasn't either PBS or the evening news. (No, wait, I lie; I also watched the occasional football game with Dad.) Basically Cat wanted somebody to squee with and I guess she figured I was her best target in our mutual friend group.
She was right.
I assume she introduced me to comics around the same time, mostly in the form of various interrelated X-Men titles with a side order of Spider-Man. She was a Marvel girl through and through and I had no frame of reference for this strange new world, so I just read everything she owned. Then we squeed. And you know, in retrospect there was not a lot of great literary merit in, for example, the X-cutioner's Song crossover arc, but hey. It was a HELL of a lot of fun, and even more fun when shared. :D
But the thing is, comics were a secondhand obsession on my part. I didn't go to our local comics shop. Or rather, I did. Maybe once a year, in Cat's company, until I left for college. Each visit was screamingly uncomfortable, not because the staff was all 'eww, girls' or anything -- they were actually enthusiastically nice, at least to Cat, who was a regular with her own hold box and everything -- but because it was obvious that this was a close-knit subculture with its own shibboleths and I was presumed an interloper unless I proved otherwise. And I was wildly over-sensitive to potential embarrassment as a kid. I mean, I still get easily embarrassed, but it was much worse then. Like to the point where I once ran out of a classroom in tears because I happened to burp during a quiet moment and people turned around to look at me, and it took half an hour for anyone to persuade me to return.
I didn't want to spend my allowance on things I didn't quite understand, and I think the staff picked up on my discomfort and disinclination to become a customer and assumed that I wasn't interested in comics at all and was just there humoring a friend. (I sometimes wonder if they would have made that same assumption if I'd been a boy, but eh, it was twenty years ago; there is no way to know.) But whatever they may have thought, in reality I was desperately interested and equally desperately unsure of how to DO anything with that interest except what I was already doing: namely, reading every single one of Cat's comics shortly after she herself did.
This wasn't very hard. I was over at Cat's house a lot in elementary school, and then for 7th and 8th grade we walked home together five days a week and I hung out at her place for a couple hours before continuing up the hill to my own house. I was there so often I became her designated guinea pig hair-comber, for god's sake, because I was the only person heartless enough to keep combing out the knots in his fur even when he squeaked bloody murder.
But I never did get comfortable with comics shops. I never read comics in public, just in Cat's bedroom, or my own bedroom if I borrowed a whole story arc at once. And I never really developed my own taste since I was at the mercy of Cat's current interests. (This means, incidentally, that I read way more mid-90s Image and Wildstorm stuff than I think I would have if I'd been the one making the purchasing choices. It's probably not surprising that I remember very little of those stories.)
I grew less actively interested in comics during high school, but I drifted back again around 2001, a year after I moved to Ithaca. And that was entirely because of the internet. I couldn't tell you the details anymore, but I spent a while lurking on Warren Ellis's long-defunct forum and reading opinion columns about the comics industry and comics as a literary medium, and an artistic medium, and, oh, lots of random stuff. I finally had a way to learn things without either having to say to Cat, "Hey, please spend your own money on this stuff you're not interested in so I can figure out if I'm interested in it," or having to walk up to strange men and be all, "Please explain this stuff to me, a relatively cute girl who is woefully ignorant of the history and culture of comics," and hope they weren't condescending jerks. And having done some exploration, I finally bought some things of my own accord, mostly collected TPBs because I believe in books and bookcases rather than cardboard boxes and plastic storage bags. A few I bought in person, venturing downtown to a local comics shop in Ithaca: a couple volumes of Sandman, a couple volumes of Lucifer, one volume of Finder, a few monthly issues of The Flash. But I still felt weird there, like an outsider intruding on a prickly and defensive cult, so I did the bulk of my shopping online.
I don't really have words for how freeing it was to realize that I could browse and buy whatever I wanted, and nobody would look at me funny while I did it.
I've never had quite the same instinctive twitch-flinch reaction to manga, probably because they don't have nearly the same cultural baggage as Western (mostly superhero, but indie also) comics do. But I do have that twitch-flinch reaction in libraries when I browse their comics collections -- which EXIST now, and it has been AMAZING to watch them spring to life over the past ten or twelve years -- or pick up something from hold or interlibrary loan. It's that old feeling of, "I am not part of this tribe and they know it," even though I have loved comics since I was, you know, ten years old. Which is twenty-three years and counting, now. And there's also a helping of, "If you were a good feminist, you would like 'better' things than these simplistic masculine-coded power fantasies," which is stupid and self-defeating, and FUCK THAT VOICE IN THE EAR, okay, because I can love power fantasies for myself, and I do and always have, and yeah, there's a lot of problematic gender stuff in comics (and a lot of sheer WTFery) but the perfect is the enemy of the good and love is not rational, you know?
...
I mention this because I checked out two volumes of Mark Waid's Daredevil run this afternoon and am probably going to put hold requests on every other Daredevil collection the Finger Lakes library system has. And yeah, I got twitchy even though I used the self-checkout machine, and I will get twitchy again every time I get the little "your book is available" email and go in to pick up another volume.
And I am sick and tired of having that twitch-flinch reaction, and I wish -- you don't know how much I WISH -- that I knew how to exorcise it after all these years.
Also, recommend me some good power fantasies that feature non-sexually-objectified women, please, so I can maybe put hold requests on them too? (I can't buy anything, I'm broke, but at least these days there's a chance some library in the system might have copies of obscure things.) [ETA: I already know about Girl Genius, and yes, I am familiar with Elfquest; that was one of Cat's big things for a while, sometime after her Dragonlance obsession.]
She was right.
I assume she introduced me to comics around the same time, mostly in the form of various interrelated X-Men titles with a side order of Spider-Man. She was a Marvel girl through and through and I had no frame of reference for this strange new world, so I just read everything she owned. Then we squeed. And you know, in retrospect there was not a lot of great literary merit in, for example, the X-cutioner's Song crossover arc, but hey. It was a HELL of a lot of fun, and even more fun when shared. :D
But the thing is, comics were a secondhand obsession on my part. I didn't go to our local comics shop. Or rather, I did. Maybe once a year, in Cat's company, until I left for college. Each visit was screamingly uncomfortable, not because the staff was all 'eww, girls' or anything -- they were actually enthusiastically nice, at least to Cat, who was a regular with her own hold box and everything -- but because it was obvious that this was a close-knit subculture with its own shibboleths and I was presumed an interloper unless I proved otherwise. And I was wildly over-sensitive to potential embarrassment as a kid. I mean, I still get easily embarrassed, but it was much worse then. Like to the point where I once ran out of a classroom in tears because I happened to burp during a quiet moment and people turned around to look at me, and it took half an hour for anyone to persuade me to return.
I didn't want to spend my allowance on things I didn't quite understand, and I think the staff picked up on my discomfort and disinclination to become a customer and assumed that I wasn't interested in comics at all and was just there humoring a friend. (I sometimes wonder if they would have made that same assumption if I'd been a boy, but eh, it was twenty years ago; there is no way to know.) But whatever they may have thought, in reality I was desperately interested and equally desperately unsure of how to DO anything with that interest except what I was already doing: namely, reading every single one of Cat's comics shortly after she herself did.
This wasn't very hard. I was over at Cat's house a lot in elementary school, and then for 7th and 8th grade we walked home together five days a week and I hung out at her place for a couple hours before continuing up the hill to my own house. I was there so often I became her designated guinea pig hair-comber, for god's sake, because I was the only person heartless enough to keep combing out the knots in his fur even when he squeaked bloody murder.
But I never did get comfortable with comics shops. I never read comics in public, just in Cat's bedroom, or my own bedroom if I borrowed a whole story arc at once. And I never really developed my own taste since I was at the mercy of Cat's current interests. (This means, incidentally, that I read way more mid-90s Image and Wildstorm stuff than I think I would have if I'd been the one making the purchasing choices. It's probably not surprising that I remember very little of those stories.)
I grew less actively interested in comics during high school, but I drifted back again around 2001, a year after I moved to Ithaca. And that was entirely because of the internet. I couldn't tell you the details anymore, but I spent a while lurking on Warren Ellis's long-defunct forum and reading opinion columns about the comics industry and comics as a literary medium, and an artistic medium, and, oh, lots of random stuff. I finally had a way to learn things without either having to say to Cat, "Hey, please spend your own money on this stuff you're not interested in so I can figure out if I'm interested in it," or having to walk up to strange men and be all, "Please explain this stuff to me, a relatively cute girl who is woefully ignorant of the history and culture of comics," and hope they weren't condescending jerks. And having done some exploration, I finally bought some things of my own accord, mostly collected TPBs because I believe in books and bookcases rather than cardboard boxes and plastic storage bags. A few I bought in person, venturing downtown to a local comics shop in Ithaca: a couple volumes of Sandman, a couple volumes of Lucifer, one volume of Finder, a few monthly issues of The Flash. But I still felt weird there, like an outsider intruding on a prickly and defensive cult, so I did the bulk of my shopping online.
I don't really have words for how freeing it was to realize that I could browse and buy whatever I wanted, and nobody would look at me funny while I did it.
I've never had quite the same instinctive twitch-flinch reaction to manga, probably because they don't have nearly the same cultural baggage as Western (mostly superhero, but indie also) comics do. But I do have that twitch-flinch reaction in libraries when I browse their comics collections -- which EXIST now, and it has been AMAZING to watch them spring to life over the past ten or twelve years -- or pick up something from hold or interlibrary loan. It's that old feeling of, "I am not part of this tribe and they know it," even though I have loved comics since I was, you know, ten years old. Which is twenty-three years and counting, now. And there's also a helping of, "If you were a good feminist, you would like 'better' things than these simplistic masculine-coded power fantasies," which is stupid and self-defeating, and FUCK THAT VOICE IN THE EAR, okay, because I can love power fantasies for myself, and I do and always have, and yeah, there's a lot of problematic gender stuff in comics (and a lot of sheer WTFery) but the perfect is the enemy of the good and love is not rational, you know?
...
I mention this because I checked out two volumes of Mark Waid's Daredevil run this afternoon and am probably going to put hold requests on every other Daredevil collection the Finger Lakes library system has. And yeah, I got twitchy even though I used the self-checkout machine, and I will get twitchy again every time I get the little "your book is available" email and go in to pick up another volume.
And I am sick and tired of having that twitch-flinch reaction, and I wish -- you don't know how much I WISH -- that I knew how to exorcise it after all these years.
Also, recommend me some good power fantasies that feature non-sexually-objectified women, please, so I can maybe put hold requests on them too? (I can't buy anything, I'm broke, but at least these days there's a chance some library in the system might have copies of obscure things.) [ETA: I already know about Girl Genius, and yes, I am familiar with Elfquest; that was one of Cat's big things for a while, sometime after her Dragonlance obsession.]
(no subject)
Date: 2015-07-09 04:23 am (UTC)(And hey, the non-sexualized was mostly in regard to comics where there is a really tiresome tradition of drawing female characters like pinup models whether that makes any sense for their characters or not, and also sticking them in T&A poses that you'd never catch male characters dead in. *sigh* I am not opposed to characters having sex, just to... eh... I think sexual objectification would be a more accurate term for what I'd rather avoid.)