Backstory: AHR
My name is AHR, and I'm an AHstar.
Yeah that's a pretty lame catch phrase. I don't know how superheroes think them up on the fly. Get it, on the fly? Superheroes fly...jeez, let's start over.
Growing up in Berkeley CA, the comics I typically came across were expressions of counter culture artistic identity, produced by scraggly teenagers who filled up zines with even scragglier black and white illustrations about how intense their lives were. It all seemed way too cool for me. In junior high my friends would talk about Ariel Schrag's latest biographical epic and I would stay silent, keeping a terrible secret about my relationship with comics.
All I cared about was Batman.
Between the ages of nine and seventeen, you could usually find me in a Barnes & Noble or comic shop standing in the Batman section and plowing through a trade paperback I had no intention of buying, but every intention of savoring. I loved Batsy's angst, his grim sense of humor, his anger, his OBVIOUS insanity, but most of all I loved his villains. The Joker remains one of my favorite characters in the history of literature. My interest/obsession with Harley and Ivy's BARELY subtextual relationship clearly indicated I was gay before I realized it myself.
Most of my friends who read comics wouldn't touch a book about capes if their lives depended on it, and I did on occasion dip into indie comic territory; I adored Sam and Max, Optic Nerve, and Cerebus (before that whole "I hate ladies" thing went off the rails). But ultimately, any trip to the comic store was going to be all about the Bat.
It wasn't until college that I really learned the extent of what comics had to offer. Under the guidance of a few comic geek friends, I plowed through Sandman, classic Daredevil, Sin City, Alan Moore's oeuvre, Grant Morrisson's crazier stuff, and tons of other classic titles that I'd been neglecting. After college, I worked as a producer on a comic book webcast called the Pulp Secret Report, and I finally started to (gasp) buy weekly books. The joy of the Wednesday comic trip opened my eyes to great non-superhero titles like Mouse Guard, Owly, Walking Dead, and the work of Jonathan Hickman.
Which brings us to today. I think of myself as a pretty well-rounded comic fan. I enjoy artistically adventurous, genuinely well written work, as well as and flashy, violent, so-ridiculous-it's-AWESOME superhero books.
And of course, I still read a whole lot of Batman. I know he's not really dead.
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