Why I Love Comic Books

It’s a love affair so old and I can barely trace it, and so new it still surprises and delights me. It keeps me company in the bathtub after long days of work or class, just like it did in the lag of high school math. I’m a self-proclaimed painter at this university, but when I’ve got time to myself, there’s not much I’d rather be doing than drawing these. I don’t know if it’s the color or the smell of the pages that draws me back to the fattening bookshelf every time, but there’s a magic in those things. It’s a magic that changed the world and changed me. I love comics.

 When I was a little girl I fell for Spider-Man, and it was all over for me after that. (If you actually read this blog, you’ll figure out pretty quick that I’m a Marvel and Jake’s a DC, but that somehow we make it work.) My first comic was Brian Michael Bendis’ and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man, which Marvel started in 2000 (I was ten at the time). It was this great re-imagining Spidey; of Peter’s High School drama, of deep moral dilemmas, life lessons, losses, breakups and makeups. I ate it up. The characters talked like me and my friends talked. I copied favorite Bagley panels in my sketchbook. All through middle and high school—it didn’t matter where I was, I got the book in my hand somehow. I followed the thing religiously right up to the ripe age of 20, when the two B’s parted ways. I was sad, and slightly disillusioned for a couple days, figuring they shared a flat like a married couple or something.

                My point is, one good book is all it takes to get you. One book I picked up when I was ten opened me up to an unimagined world; to an art form that would not let me go from then on. When we were around 12 or 13, my buddy Katelyn and I grabbed a thick stack of computer paper and a ballpoint pen and began making our own comics. They existed for absolutely no other reason than our own enjoyment: an outlet for little imaginative minds. My comics began as playthings, which is the way it ought to be. We called our book about the mischievous mishaps of four goofy teenagers The Drool Monkey Posse, and they looked a little like this:

And later like this:

 As an artist, comics freed me. As long as I was reading them, (and I was ALWAYS reading them,) I wanted to make them. And I could make anything I wanted. I imagined comics about aliens, circus performers, rock stars, fairies, and everything in between. Sometimes dairy entries weren’t enough for me and I’d recount my days with panels and thought bubbles. For me comic books were more than a way to pass the time or another form on entertainment: form the start, they pulled me into their creative realm, and made me itch to be an active participant in them.

 I think it was the unique idea of the comic that delighted me so much: picture and word married on the page in this beautiful way, so that you experience a story moment by moment.

And that’s it: comics are a beautiful way to tell a story. I think that good comics are measured in moments. Each panel is an entire drawing that captures an entire thought, but really, it’s only a moment. Hundreds of these lovely, delicate, tiny moments, when strung together, lead you through an entire epic. If words won’t do, a comic can make you experience a moment in the expression of its character’s face, or in the space of the page, or the light and the dark contrasted inside the panels. Tim Sale creates these moments like few others can:

Another reason comic books keep me in their gravity is because they feed the fantasy fanatic within. Comic books are glorious science fiction, escapism at its finest, otherworldly and strange. You see this go hokey and wrong all the time: but you also get a lot of stuff that’s just perfect.  Swamp Thing by Alan Moore is just perfect. I find it’s the oldies that do this for me. When I read The Dark Phoenix Saga and other outer space X-Men adventures that were written before I was born, it’s like time travel. Comics have this secret ability to transport you.

And it’s more intimate than a movie. Anyone who reads anything can tell you that. Remember how I said I followed that Spider-man book for 10 years straight? You don’t walk away from that without feeling like you know the characters, because you experienced life with them. It doesn’t matter how old you are. This is why you had people literally emotionally distraught over the death of Gwen Stacy in the 70s, making death threats to Stan Lee and stuff. It’s because the writers and the artists did a good job—they made people love her, and then miss her. It’s why nerds through fussy fits whenever the company changes someone’s costume or does an origin story they don’t like. They feel a personal connection to and possessiveness of the characters, and I think that’s something to smile at. It means the book was good enough to pierce them—or maybe that they’re a little too invested. I don’t know. I do know that in the final installment of Brian K Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, I cried.  I had bonded with the characters through this crazy, long, kick ass journey. I was grateful to have read something that made me feel so much.

                I think it’s time for comics. People are starting to realize what a potentially explosive art form this is, and how it’s still so largely undiscovered and underappreciated. When visual art dances with literature, you get more than kids’ magazines. You get a way of communicating that is wholly unique and fantastic. More and more we’re seeing these independent comics popping up: self-inspired artists writing autobiographies and romances and classic adaptations and the like. I love the cape, but there’s room for more than the cape in western comic books. I really think we’re about to see these things take off like the world has not yet seen. I’m just thrilled to be along for the ride.

Steph