Backstory: Klarion
My name is Klarion, and I grew up in a town with no comics shop.
It's true. I was born and raised in a highly rural area in the American southeast. It was a mixed blessing, I assure you: on the one hand, endless woods to explore as a child; on the other, rednecks with guns. We take the good with the bad in all things and looking back time has sanded down enough corners that I don't really regret a life without cable television. My point is, as a child my access to comics was limited to a half-dozen titles kept in rotation on the bottom of the spinning magazine rack at a gas station across the valley.
Most of the titles they purported to carry were unreliably stocked. Superman failed to take hold of me because the same issue of some comic featuring him was kept on the rack for months before the store ordered new issues so I didn't have a chance to form an ongoing interest. The titles they did keep up to date were television tie-ins. This means that during the formative years of most readers' comics addictions I got to read two comics on a regular basis: Transformers, which made absolutely no sense, and the '80s DC Star Trek title, featuring the original-recipe crew in '80s movie uniforms. Mainly the plots consisted of much darker retreads of and sequels to stories used in the TV series: the murderous, possessing entity known as Redjac, slave-trafficker Harry Mudd and the evil human & Vulcan empire of Mirror, Mirror. It featured countless writers, among them such queer-friendly sci-fi and comics luminaries as J. Michael Straczynski and Peter David - the writer who so recently confirmed that Shatterstar and Rictor are both as gay as a plaid rabbit, much to Rob Liefeld's pearl-clutching horror.
It was that last story - the Mirror, Mirror arc written by Mike Barr - that got me hooked on comics. It's about Kirk & crew checking in on Hot Evil Spock and, once there, trying to organize a coup against the ruling powers of the Empire with the help of the alternate universe's Romulans and Klingons. It features some very Kirky ham-fisted philosophizing and serious fan service in the form of a Spock-on-Spock battle of the mindmelds. It also went somewhere I'd never considered as a child: it alluded to the domestic political fallout from Kirk's various misadventures. It took a concept with which I'd already been familiar, as the old series was being played to death on the local indie station, and expanded it to include the civilian political arena ignored by the show. A year and a half later I would find myself glued to TV news reports of the Iran-Contra scandal, reexamining a lot of my entertainment-inspired attitudes about authority, laws and the individuals who flaunt them.
When I got accepted into Pink Kryptonite I started thinking about why I still read comics. Of course I'll discuss more current comics in future posts (I love to hear people talk about what books they read, and I'm going to be doing some of that myself) but whenever I ponder why the form holds such fascination for me I keep going back to that Mirror, Mirror storyline. Something about it allowed that comic, and the overall experience of reading it month to month while it unfolded, to lodge itself in my brain without the larger context to which most comics readers were being exposed. As a result, I tend to eschew superhero comics - excepting anything related to Batman - and favor instead the weird and the wild. A Dummy's Guide to Danger, for instance, is easily one of my favorite comics of the last five years.
What does that mean to you? It means there are going to be names and backstory and settings of which I've simply never heard. It means I don't really go for guys-in-tights comics but I'm not opposed to them and there are some I quite enjoy. It means I'm going to have some pretty off-kilter titles I'll want to talk about. It also means I'm occasionally going to point out a dead TV show I think is ripe for a comics tie-in. (I mean, c'mon, don't tell me you wouldn't pick up a comic book continuation of The Rockford Files.)
So, that's me. What got you started reading comics? If you have a comic you most wish you could read again for the first time, which one is it?
Klarion
Posted to New Writer on 7 October 2009
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: fandom, Nostalgia, Peter David, Star Trek
Thanks for sharing, Klarion (love the name, by the way.) I read a lot of Nintendo comics as a kid...Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Captain N, etc. I liked them a lot, but what really got me into comics was Neil Gaiman's Sandman series that I started reading in my early twenties. Originally, I purchased the first tpb of the series for my brother, in an attempt to get him to read more often. He didn't really get into it, unfortunately. So I started reading it, and quickly found myself hooked. That was almost 10 years ago, and I now consider myself a full-fledged addict. I will even be attending my first Comic Con in New York on the 17th :-)
Hi! Looking forward to reading you!
I grew up without cable television, too! Though that was because I was really very poor, not because I lived in a rural area. Books and comics were my TV shows as a child and certain writers and artists have kept my interests going.
I have an early memory of sitting in front of the static-y, local Fox channel playing Simpsons on our tiny, black and white TV... whilst I ate Doritos (a rare treat) and sipped a Pepsi whilst reading a big stack of comics my mom had found for me at a garage sale. I remember thinking that time was the best ever.
I would also sit on the floor in Walgreens and read comics there... but not buy them, heh. Today I do rather well for myself and can even afford those volumes of Sandman.
@Branovices: Oh, friend, let me tell you about the comics I read sitting on the floor of that gas station. I'm sure they hated me but pennies were precious in that tiny little town.
@Lauren: I had a very similar experience. I hadn't read comics in years, then in my early 20's a friend shoved Sandman at me while it was still in progress. I loved it and another friend waved Cerebus at me (before it got all crazy) and then I went to an actual comics store for the first time and the rest is history. My boyfriend collected all of Sandman as a monthly subscription. He read it one issue at a time, one month at a time, across all the years it took to come out. Finding that out was one of the first "click" moments of our earliest dates.
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?