Comic Retrospective: Prolog

I got into comics late in my life. Sure, I read indie comics since I was a child and I watched Marvel and DC shows ever since I learned to use the television. I even perused local comic shops frequently. but I never had any interest in the printed medium until I was a late teen. Until then, comics were just jokes about stoned hippies, or poorly drawn scribbles complaining about the government or the X-men save the moon.

(Can this be anymore 90's?)

And that was it. Asking me about comics was like asking me about a wall. It's there. It has a purpose. Some people suck at building walls and some people are experts. Walls can look like anything and can be made to appeal to anyone in particular the person who made the wall wants. Was I interested in walls? No. Did I hate walls? No.

Then, one day I needed to kill a lot of time, so I bothered to check out comics again. I found this guy. He looked like he'd suffered an ambush makeover by Lobo's hair stylist, he dressed like the crow, at some point I think he stole Spawn's cape, and he was badly suffering from 90's snarling constipation.

(Everyone in the 90's had rickets)

I was introduced to something VERY new. There was no long narrative intro, no backtracking, no flashbacks to an origin story, and the fight scenes were barely in the book. It didn't resemble anything like a superhero cartoon or issue.

Michael Morbius woke up to find himself a prisoner of a mad scientist. But this guy resembled a real doctor. There were no delusions of grandeur, not insane laughter, no schemes. The guy likes to study the terminally ill and kept them alive and aware as he studied their conditions and operated on them—not to help them as victims, but to prolong their suffering so he could keep studying them. Did I mention the main audience was children and teenagers?

The story didn't try to hold your hand because you were young and couldn't handle words like 'kill' or 'die' or pretend death wasn't real, and it didn't go for the lowest common denominator. It was meant to be absolutely terrifying psychologically and it did that almost perfectly. The protagonist wasn't someone who tried to save the world, he was just some guy who knew he was in over his head but tried to stop a bad guy because he knew no one else would.

I had never seen that kind of story before and it earned my respect for the medium. This was what it was now. It was like going from Trouble With Tribbles to In the Pale Moonlight. While the first is enjoyable and optimistic and the latter is full of unethicality and amorality, it was an evolution I enjoyed (both for comics and Star Trek). It changed my view of the medium, and especially the genre, from objective to subjective.

The specific character had much less impact than the story and the depth the character gave to it. In doing so, it changed acknowledgment to approval. It changed my thoughts on the medium as a whole from objective to subjective.

However, as much as something literally so small changed my opinion of something vast, I was still young with an inconsistent income and I soon found myself moving to a new house and into high school. Pressure to overachieve in school increased dramatically, social interests veered sharply away from anything defined as pertaining to 'geeks', and my new interest created problems at home.

My parents, though college educated, were mired in the school of thought that things like video games (I had to keep it a secret until I was an adult if I wanted to play at a friends house) and comics made one stupid, violent, and out of college. As much as that notion didn't make sense in the late '90's to anyone who knew a thing about comics, it made less sense that they whole-heartedly approved of indie comics such as Elfquest or humor such as Furry Freak Brothers. Those were graphic novels or silly nostalgia; they didn't count.

Then karma came along and changed everything. While my parents were vocal about voting against it, our neighborhood gained free cable (only 20 new channels or so). They never mentioned a single word of protest though, when it brought our household Batman: the Animated Series. They enjoyed it almost as much as I did. On Leather Wings, followed by Heart of Ice, reminded me of why I had ever wanted to pursue my hidden urge to buy more comics. There was a depth to these characters emotionally. I didn't care if it was a show for kids and the writers very often didn't care about that either (that or they were pure evil and wanted to give children something so good it would ruin all future cartoons). The show, and it's evolution into Batman and Superman, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited, often gave me a view into the psyche of those characters.

(Sometimes I wish I didn't want to know anything about their psyches)

In the later years of high school I was introduced to manga by a friend and found an interest in the foreign art style as I entered college. As much as I studied the history, culture, and connection that continues this day with American media, manga inspired me more as an idea than as something to continue. Either the stories went on forever (and I ended up preferring the anime most of the time), or I found singular stories that I regarded more as individual pieces than representatives or advertisements for the different form of the medium. While tales like 1001 Nights in Space and Uzumaki tantalizing beyond any other previous mix of graphic art and prose, manga lacked the staying power and pull that American retained over the years.

Now that I was an adult, I had more privacy and leniency. I eventually bought my own Playstation and began doing my best not to keep up with comics, but to find what I knew I was likely to enjoy once comic shops and bookstores carrying trades finally began showing up near me. I checked out the 'landmark' stories of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and...they were okay. I preferred reading Tower of Babel for just plain being enjoyably silly or Identity Crisis for all the wrong reasons.

(Which were pretty much all the parts DC never followed up on)

I was in my mid-twenties when I actually began to take a look back at the superheroes I liked and read their history and stick with a continuity for a whole arc. I learned a lot about the history of characters, the overall differences between Marvel and DC and why I tended to gravitate towards the former, and to stay far away from Frank Miller. Someone should really have warned me about him.

I dabbled all over the medium, especially as digital comics became easier to access without loads of cash. I checked out manga, found Elfquest had returned with all-new stories by the original artists, but I had become a die-hard Marvel fan.

It's not perfect and I read the occasional indie, Image, or DC book, but Marvel is now my rock. A bit eroded, but solid.

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