Where it all began...

I'm here to talk about comics.  I have been reading comics, loving comics, for a very long time - since before the Marvel Age of the early 1960s.  I loved the medium.  I read whatever I could get my hands on, with hoarded allowance, at the local corner store.  It wasn't much, but it was precious to me.

Then one day I picked up, on spec, a new comic that caught my eye - well, new to me.  Something I'd never heard of.  Fantastic Four #18, it was called - "Return of the Super-Skrull", by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.


I was mesmerized.  The characters, the situation, the dialogue all seemed so interesting after the pale and superficial stories I'd been reading in comics before.

I'd loved the medium already. Now I was in love with a genre.

I haunted that corner store in search of more Marvel titles.  Spider-Man #4 was the next one I found.  Then Journey into Mystery, with Thor, God of Thunder - suddenly I had a fascination with Norse gods. First issues of more comics started to appear, like Daredevil and X-Men.  I was particularly fond of Sgt. Fury and his Howlin' Commandos, subtitled The war comic for people who hate war comics.  Yup: that was me.  I read it out loud to my dolls, trying to imitate Nick Fury's gruff voice.

None of my friends liked comics, which is maybe why I still feel the need to talk about comics in a blog today.  My parents waited patiently for me to outgrow my fascination: if they were still alive, they'd be still waiting today.  Smart kids didn't read comics.  Girls didn't read comics, except for Millie the Model and sometimes Archie.    So I occasionally read Millie the Model for the sake of gender solidarity, and then went back to reading and rereading and loving the superhero stories.

When I went to England as a student in the mid-1970s, I thought I could go without comics for a year.  Perhaps I could have, but I didn't even try: I found a street-cart selling American comics on Charing Cross Road, and was able to buy Master of Kung Fu and Conan the Barbarian and Spider-Man on a regular basis.

I wrote letters to comics, my first one published in Fantastic Four #32.  I wrote more letters to comics,  and do it still. I married (and later divorced) a man I met through comics.  I found friends who read comics in SF fandom, and then - with the invention of the Internet - online.  I found fanfic and meta writers and reviewers and costumers.

In the early 1980s, Frank Miller told me he thought the comic book industry would be gone in another five years. I am so glad he was wrong. The publication of comics - in the U.S. and elsewhere - just goes on and on.  With new delights, disappointments, and developments all the time.  Manga!  Blockbuster Hollywood movies.  TV shows based on comics.  Novelizations, graphic novels, books teaching how to write or draw comics, how to read them.  Books about their history.  Magazines, reviews, webcomics, and blogs like this one.

I have opinions on all of it.

Who am I?  Writer, editor, virtual assistant, tarot reader, office manager.  Canadian, female, bisexual.  Humanist.  Historian.

And always happy to talk about comics.