No More Invisible Girls

I get the feeling that I was just born into it.  Growing up, my parents had an enormous collection of comic strip trades, mostly Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, that I loved to look at and wonder about when I was younger.  I wasn’t actually able to read very well until the 4th grade, thanks to a reading disability, so I liked comics because at the very least, I could infer what was going on and there wasn’t walls and walls of text that would get jumbled up.

Later, my mother made a habit of buying my younger brother and I Archie comics from the grocery store.  My grandma also had a stack of old Archie comics from when my mother and my aunts were younger that I read when I wasn’t in the mood for the romance novels or westerns that is more or less the only other reading material in my grandparents house.  This was followed pretty shortly by the Great Manga Boom (my first was a series called S.CRY.ed and a volume of Battle Angel Alita from the local library) and then later, I started gravitating more towards graphic novels and webcomics.  I used to spend hours on our slow dial up connection reading through webcomic archives.

I dipped my toes briefly in mainstream, but it wasn’t until I was in college, surrounded by comic nerds and meeting more online, that I really went ahead and jumped in head first.  A good chunk of the manga I loved had quite a lot to do with heroic characters and all manner of good-vs-evil storylines that ranged from straight forward to gray, so superhero comics was actually a really comfortable fit for me.  

Fastforward about four years and here I am.  I’ve actually been pretty lucky, the guys who work at both of the shops I visit religiously have accepted my presence and will chat with me about movies or superheroes.