ORIGIN STORIES: How do people get into comics? That’s the question that was on my mind after reading Journalista!’s rant/essay about (what he views as) the rotten state of the industry.

Because ultimately, that’s what I think J! is calling for–more people with more kinds of tastes shaping the industry. And when I think about it that way, Dirk’s pessimism or somewhat desperate edge seems pretty persuasive to me, even though I agree with Sean Collins (if it was him?) that hosts of awesome comics are coming out right now.

The first problem here is that people think comics are something you need to “be into.” It’s weird to go to comic shops and browse, and cart comic books around and read them on the bus and in the coffeeshop line, in a way that it’s not weird at all to check out the latest movie reviews or browse the new releases at Borders. The medium is associated with a genre, and a genre that gets significantly less respect than it deserves. I’d say the best superhero comics are better than the best mysteries, for example, but get a lot less respect than The Long Goodbye, and even less respect than Agatha Christie (who herself is held in undeserved contempt).

I’m pretty sure that’s why, even though I’d read comics all my life, I never thought of reading comics as a thing I do. I read ElfQuest as a kid, and loved it. I’d stay up after my bedtime re-reading ElfQuest by the light from the streetlamps streaming in through my window. (Mom, if you’re reading this, please don’t kill me!) I think I read Maus in junior high, or maybe early high school? In high school I got into Love and Rockets. But all this time I never even considered figuring out whether there were other comics out there that I might like. When I started getting into movies, or punk music, I just assumed that I would find all kinds of cool stuff out there if I looked; but I didn’t even think of the comics I loved as comics. They were just… you know, ElfQuest and Maus and L&R;. Oh and Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Sui generis, and not really sharing a medium. (Admittedly, EPC really is pretty different from the other three, but still, sequential art and all that.) I’d be interested to find out whether this is how most people who read Persepolis, say, think about it. If it is how they think, Persepolis’s popularity won’t spill out onto other really good comics.

In the summer of 2000, I needed a quick, “intellectual coating over a candy center”-type article for my college’s right-wing monthly. Figured I’d go see the most intriguing of the summer’s blockbuster pix, “X-Men.” Had fun; wrote a piece about the implications of genetic engineering for that Glenn Loury tagline about how conservatism is “the belief that human nature has no history.” Forgot about it.

This past summer, the “X2” hype started, along with the “Matrix: Reloaded” (bleah) hype. It’s more fun to be excited about two movies than one, so I figured, what the hey, I liked the first one; I’ll see the second.

I didn’t like it. Or so I thought. But something about it nagged at me, and I ended up seeing it several times. I think the main attractions were a) I never see new big-budget action pictures, because most of them are guaranteed crapathons, so “X2” is one of my only exposures to all those spectacular SFX and sleek designs; and b) the acting is really excellent. Nobody gets enough to do, but they (almost) all make their mark. Famke Janssen has this one thing she does with her hand, twice in the movie, that’s just perfect.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I was interested. Started reading other people’s reviews of the movie. This led to descriptions of various X-Men comics. Some of them sounded good. Hmm, I thought. Wonder if I’d like any of these. It was around this time that I started having bad insomnia, so I’d stay up late reading review sites and trying to get together a list of comics that sounded cool, basically in order to kill time. Ended up getting some okay stuff (X-Force; eh) and some stuff I still think is really good (New X-Men). The report is here.

I asked for recommendations, got ’em, and spent lots more up-all-night hours trawling review sites. Read the first Alias book and was just blown away. Started trying to figure out what I liked about it.

I think some of it is that I’m naturally oriented much more toward words than toward pictures. Even in discussing painting or photography, it’s easier for me to pick up on the symbolism of the objects or poses in the work than on the composition elements and the way they advance the picture’s meaning. I love comics because, like movies, they have enough “words” (dialogue, but also characters and plots) to make the work the composition does obvious to me. So they make me think visually, basically opening up a whole new way of approaching art. I can walk away from a comic, as with a movie, looking at the whole world differently. I love Alias in large part because every inch of every page advances the point of the comic–nothing’s wasted. It’s tight. And so when I ask myself, “OK, why did this page have such a big impact on me?”, I learn how to think visually. Comics stretch my abilities to read, intuit, and convey meaning–while also, like any medium, providing everything from dumb fun (Ultimate X-Men) to genuinely powerful art (A Small Killing).

So now I think of reading comics as a Thing I Do. I browse comic shops. I read lots of different kinds of comics, comics that have nothing in common except medium, but now I notice the medium, whereas when I was reading ElfQuest and the rest I didn’t even know there was a medium to notice.

I think this comes back, again, to the medium-is-viewed-as-a-genre problem: I didn’t notice comics as a medium until I was interested in superheroes as a genre. That’s an amazingly bassackward way to approach any medium. No wonder the industry has problems!

On a superficial level, I’m exactly the comics reader that DC and Marvel are currently trying to produce, no? I saw one of their big-budget movies and now I read lotsa comics. But in actuality, right-wing movie review + desire to see a popular movie for once in my life + genuinely good movie + insomnia + obsessive Internet usage + blog (thanks esp. to Unqualified Offerings!) + really good advice from one particular comics clerk (at Beyond Comics, which, unfortunately, isn’t the better of the two DC stores, but which has superfriendly and helpful clerks) = an origin story more convoluted than the one from the Hulk movie. This is not a chain of events to be counted on!

More on separating medium and genre in the next post.