No More Invisible Girls

Looking back, it seems like everyone wanted me to read comics. My parents were both big readers, and both had been comic book fans as a kid. My dad loved Garfield as an adult, and I became slightly obsessed with the orange cat. My mum took me to second hand book sales every few months, and as well as novels I’d stock up on Mad Magazines (influenced by my big brother) and any comics that had bright colours. I had quite a collection of Barbie comics for a while, and I wish I still had them - she was pretty badass in the comics.

I didn’t get into superhero comics until I was in my late teens. I used to watch Smallville with my dad (who had owned hundreds of Superman, Superboy, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen comics as a boy), my brother (who had collected Phantom comics as well as the odd Marvel or DC issue), and my best friend (who thought that Tom Welling was hot). The summer I finished high school, I found out my local libraries had some trade paperbacks. The first one I read was Green Arrow: Archer’s Quest which was so much more emotional and complicated than I had expected. The second one was Young Justice. I read half of it in bed the week before Christmas, laughing and completely falling in love with 90’s Superboy. 

When I woke up in the morning, my dad was dead, and I spent the next week alternating between crying and staring into space. When I finally picked Young Justice again, I felt such a mix of emotions - relief that I could still find pleasure in a comic that will always be tied in my mind with the night my dad died, regret that I hadn’t read it earlier and shared it with him, and then an incredible frustration as I found out the comic was already canceled. 

For me, I will always be holding out for the same things from comics - the sense of fun and adventure, good triumphing, and girls kicking ass, characters that I want to be best friends with and moments that are so adorable and silly they make me laugh. While I was in mourning I read through all of the 90’s run of Superboy, most of Young Justice, and found the JLI. And while those series all had their character deaths and sad stories, there was still a charm and humour present. As petty and selfish as it is, I am so angry that those characters don’t exist anymore, that grit and angst and violence have buried those characters who kept me optimistic and made me laugh when I was going through a dark time.

In the past few years I’ve been doing my best to help other people get into comics and find that same worth that I see in them. The kinds of comics that I love are still out there - I’m slowly getting better at finding them - and I hope I’ll always love reading them.