Blogs are like comics...

The amount of interest oscillates up and down and all around.

I know that no one is reading this since I stopped writing since the Xbox arrived and pushed my interest in video games to the forefront. If I don't consistently write these, people leave. So I write this blog as an exercise of my own memory which has always been poor when recalling events and not list of facts.

Capree and I just watched the documentary, "Comic Book Confidential", thanks to our friend Kayla. We both had a smile on our face the entire time, as it brought back many memories from our lives. I let Capree explain her thoughts on her blog.
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I started reading comics in the cliche way through superhero comics. I believe it came about from the reprinting of the X-Men stories from the Chris Claremont Dark Phoenix Saga. This were released in the early 1990s to reprint the X-Men stories from the 1980s. Placing supplemental new stories with reprinted stories would show up in the Classic X-Men line.

What's great about this memory is all the things that are triggered with thinking about it. My brother, Quinn, and I would go to Night Flight Comics after we got our haircut at the Cottonwood Mall. We'd always go look through the back issue bins, trying to find new series that were mentioned in the Classic X-Men issues. It's funny now that I think of it that I never kept up with the most current story of X-Men at time. I always followed 5 to 10 years behind. While it is and was obvious that Marvel Comics was milking the franchise for it was worth through it's countless spin offs, I simply didn't care. There was so much to discover. I remember I got a X-Men superhero encyclopedia through the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school. I wish I knew where that was...

Eventually, I broke out of my boyhood transfix on superheroes. Using my interest of
The Simpsons at the time, I found interest in Bill Morrison who worked on the Simpsons comics. He actually did an appearance at Night Flight where he signed the Treehouse of Horror comics and did a personalized portrait of your favorite Simpsons character. I asked him to do Groundskeeper Willie, and he drew it in like 5 seconds. Again, I wish I knew where that was...

At this point, I started to take notice of individual artists and followed them from series to series. I remember Battle Chasers and The Darkness during this time. But I had found that I was still trapped in the mainstream notion of what comics are. Big chested women (and men), technically and meticulously colored, with stories that simply never end until the reader loses interest.

Two particular comics came about that really changed everything for me: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. My friend, Tyler, and I would look for all the issues of Johnny while I found Jimmy Corrigan on my own. I had read that Jimmy Corrigan had received a National Book Award which seemed impressive because graphic novels never seemed to be critically acclaimed or accepted as a art form like a book. I ordered the hardcover edition, and the rest is history. From Jimmy Corrigan's author, Chris Ware I found a world of independent comics where real world stories and issues were addressed. In addition, the artist's style was completely at their whim without any preconceived notions of what a comic book should be.

I could continue on, but I'll save some of my thoughts for another time. I'll just say, that all of this really culminated at ComicCon last year where all my the different phases were mashed together. Giant superhero publishers with big movie deals and the individual artists who pulled just enough money together for a booth, it is all there. For those of you are into comics at all (I'm looking at you), go to ComicCon.