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Comically Spoken

I read comics as a kid, titles from the States mostly.  Marvel.  Lots of X titles. I was a bit of an outsider, and to quote Liz Lemon: “Rejection from society is what created The X-Men.”

The comic book bubble that swelled up in the early/mid 90s isn’t really remembered as a golden era.  I got into the X-men right after Claremont, so maybe that’s weird timing. 

There was a lot of hype, books with holograms on the cover, Superman “died”.  I didn’t even read Superman, and had a funny chip on my shoulder about any DC titles save for Batman, but I ate it up just the same.  I would buy one to read and one to keep in the original poly-bag, archived in those long white boxes.  It’s what everyone did?

Though my comic collection never funded anything spectacular, I still maintain that there was some great writing then, some good art too.  Some of those big swelling stories, spanning titles, months and months - some of them were worth the hype. 

I had a box at Comically Speaking, and never saw all that many other girls there.  I felt sort of special in the scene at my comic book store - an outsider there too.  I dug the chicks in my comics, though never aspired much to be a comic heroine myself.  I loved participating in the X-universe; there was a place for me as a young female reader in the fandom - but I felt pushed away as well.  All of the characters I felt closest to: Storm, Jean Grey, Karma; their bodies were fascinating, unrelatable, sometimes terrifying.  I read the strange bodies of my preferred heroines like some kind of warning, I knew that something was amiss. 

Though I could never totally reconcile the physicality of women in comics, I was pretty jazzed about the hints of sex that crept up.  I liked knowing that my heroes boned down sometimes, or even the suggestion that they did.  I once connected with a male friend that a single panel of an X-comic - revealing the silhouette of a bare breast brushing against a man’s chest - had an impact, not insignificant, on both of our early ideas about sex.  Probably we both just thought it was hot, and were a little surprised to see it there, bare and obscured.

So I read comics a kid, and haven’t been very hip to a lot of recent mainstream work, and I never got into Manga at all.  I was reading the Times today, and I can’t even begin to place what it would be to transplant my experience as a young female comic reader to Japan.  I wonder what warnings might register.