Graphic content ahead!

Amy: Sheldon I'm disappointed, as a brilliant man you're entitled to a vice. I could understand frequenting an opium den or hunting your fellow man for sport, but this lame-o!
Sheldon: A, comic books employ story telling through sequential art, a medium that dates back 17, 000 years to the cave paintings of Lascaux and B, you play the harp. Like that's cool.

Time to leave the gloom and doom behind, and start that section now where we talk about comics and graphic novels. (Actually, there will be some gloom and doom.)

Writing one made me think I should read more, but as I have been working on both, I have realized that I have a lot more history with both than I thought. I think part of that may be that I spent a lot more time than I realized with nerds.

The people whom I am going to mention are not people that I ever thought of as nerds, but looking back on the Star Trek obsession, the action figures, the games of laser tag (which I participated in) and the games of Magic: The Gathering (which I did not participate in), I may have missed the obvious. Maybe nerd-ism expires after high school, Big Bang Theory aside. They will come up more as we get into my comic writing history.

My introduction to comics predates all of that, going back to the girl next door. Shaila was a year older than me, and she was only there part of the time due to her parents’ divorce and their custody arrangement, but she had a lot of cool stuff in that garage, and she was reasonably generous about sharing. Because of her I got to play with Lite-Brite and many fine board games, but also she had boxes and boxes of comics, and they were printed material and I devoured them.

We were respectively a third and fourth grader, when we met, and we weren’t that much older when her father moved, so none of it was too hard-core. There was lots of Archie and Richie Rich, but there was also some Teen Titans, and some superheroes in the future that were trying to keep the earth from being suffocated by a giant chain, and also, there was Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.

Amethyst introduced me to one of the hard facts of the comic world. I was really into the series, and Shaila was portioning them out to me, because I seriously would have taken the stack home and read them in one night, but being one year older (and the owner) gives you a certain amount of authority, and she was into that. One day she tells me…

“I shouldn’t have let you start reading those.”
”Why not?”
”The end is going to come out while I’m here, so we won’t ever get to see it.”
”Can’t we still get it?”
”No.”

I think the reason she had so many comics was her mother had some sort of connection in Salem, and yet why her being in Aloha for the summer meant that she could not take advantage of that is still not clear. Regardless, I don’t know what happened with Amethyst. I assume the good guys won, but with some sad losses, and that somehow she reconciled her Gemworld ancestry and Earth upbringing.

Anyway, this taught me a very important lesson, in that continuing storylines will leave you hanging. When I had the opportunity at times to buy a comic of my own, I almost always went for one of those that was a collection of ghost stories. That was it was self-contained, and spooky!

Looking back has also clarified another spotty memory for me. I remembered sometimes going with Misty to what I thought was Dark Horse Comics, like it was a store, but that didn’t seem right. Well, I remembered comics and a horse, is what it was. Actually we were going to Pegasus Books, which is now Things from Another World. I know I bought an Elfquest there.

Misty would buy things that were special, like the Spider-Man where he and MJ got married and Bob Mackie designed the gown (that’s why I knew about Gwen Stacey before), or this pretty cool one going over various Star Trek characters from both the show and the movies.

I would read those (without her permission!) and I would occasionally pick up a Simpsons or something, but I was more into comic strips, as they ran in the paper, and that eventually led me into web comics where I found some other interesting things.