Confessions of a closet comic fan

[shadowkat]

Up until recently, I never admitted in public that I like
comic books. Actually I still don't. Except online, where I am hidden behind a posting identity. The posting name itself is derived from a comic book and it isn't the character's name I borrowed and changed slightly so much as the character's alter-ego or name to hide her real identity. Shadowcat - which I altered to Shadowkat. The powers being the ability to make herself and any and all solid objects intangible, to disrupt forms.

The reason I don't admit to liking comics, is well, I don't like the stereotype - the comic geek who is obsessed with every little detail of his universe being right and fights endlessly over which writer or artist was the true soul of the work and the precision of what happened when. I also don't like most comic geeks, after about two hours, they annoy me in much the same way I confess Star Trek fanatics do. The rigid
focus on structure and rules and everything fitting between the lines of a neat little box gets on my nerves. But see, I was the kid who refused to color within the lines. Or paint
by the numbers. I ended up drawing my own pictures. I don't
like things boxed in. So the comics I saw in my youth - the ones my brother brought home? Bored me - they had nice neat little boxes and nice neat little stories, neatly wrapped, no mess, no muddle, and each adventure lead neatly into the next one. Tin Tin, Asterix (The French Comic about the Gaules that I discovered in France in high school in 1984), and the superhero comics. He would spend hours drawing tiny replicas of these superheros, precise, perfect. Then eventually lost interest, and the comics left our house. Except for Calvin and Hobbes - which was an innovative comic strip that more often than not refused to follow the rules of comic strips, jumping outside the lines, wandering the margins, turning a sunday comic strip into a watercolor of one scene for that space. Or
bringing cubism to the daily paper. When the compilations of the cartoons came out - my father eagerly bought them, a frustrated cartoonist, writer, artist himself - he fell in love with the wackiness.

It wasn't until college that I discovered comics. Or comics I liked. A friend introduced me to them, she had a huge box in her dorm closet with the X-Men and Spiderman, dating back to the 1960s when each book was started. She told me the history, laid out the conflicts, and I became fascinated with the twists turns and bendings of rules in both series. Things, most comic book store owners and traditionalists would despise and made them give up the books were oddly enough what attracted me. Boys were attracted to neat adventures with geeky superheros like themselves. Seeing no superheros who fit me, that was never my attraction. What attracted me was the hybrid of art and words on the page often intersecting to tell a story, the more the two danced or combined the more intrigued I became. One artist, in the mid 90's, name of Jai Le
I believe, did the oddest thing with light. He used lots of black backdrops, highlighting nothing more than one or two features in a character to get across a point - a grin, cyclop's red visor, half a face, a flair of hair, a profile.
Looking at Le's art was like reading poetry in motion. Or watching a silent film. Characters broke free of the rigid lines, jumped across margins. Some artists such as Alex Ross created watercolors and oil paintings on the page. Others such as Frank Miller made one feel as if they were watching a black and white John Huston film.

While I loved writers like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller. My true love was the messy, random universe of the X-Men. Where villians became heroes and heroes became villians.
In the later books the demarcations seemed to melt more and more. The White Queen ceased being a villain somewhere around
the 1990s. And as a result she became increasingly more interesting. Same with Magneto, whose villain status often changed depending on the situation - which is true to life actually. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It was that unpredictablity that entranced me. And kept me enthralled until 2001, when I had to give up my habit due to financial problems and drifted away from the books. Collecting X-Men comic books can get expensive.

I didn't tell people about it. I hid the books in boxes in my bedroom, under a sheet. If I went into a store, I did it alone and somewhat quiltily. My guilty habit. My secret passion. Comic books get a harsh rap in our society or at least the US. They are considered low art by some. And since most comics are science fiction or fantasy derived and written by men, women tend to scoff at them. They are violent in places. And some are granted redundant. But there are books that will blow you away - with their imperfect melding of words and pictures flowing across the page. And not all of them are about the superhero who saves the day and wanders to the next adventure like a 1940s cliff-hanger adventure series. Even the superhero books have moved away from that approach. Superman in the early 90s actually died, and the comics explored how his universe dealt with his absence, what that meant, and how other heroes attempted to fill in the gap. Batman, grew darker, and conflicted - about where the line was between himself and the enemies he fought on a daily basis. Spiderman
lost his identity and his sense of self. The X-men became outlaws, hunted down, villians to the rest of their universe,
and at time vigilantes - debating whether the villains they opposed such as Magneto and Apocalypse may not actually have a point - in a Darwin universe, isn't it us against them?

My parents occassionally pester me about selling the vast comic collection I have - I have X-men books and compilations from pretty much X-men 1 through the issue in Fall 2001.
I also have the Spiderman books, Superman, Batman, a Wonderwoman, Sandman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Books of Magic.
But I can't bring myself to part with the stories tucked neatly behind their fragile covers, inside plastic folders for the older ones. I worry sometimes that the closet the old versions are tucked away in while get flooded by a hurricane.
About 85% of my collection resides in long white comic book boxes on Hilton Head Island, because I have no room and my parents kindly took the books with them when they moved. But my parents are book collectors - so they can appreciate the odd love and fascination I have for this fragil novels, even if they can't possibly understand it.

Now, three years after I gave up the habit, I'm ironically looking at the X-Men again, ironically through the lense of the creator of the show I'd switched my fascination to.
Perhaps the fact I could switch from X-Men to BTVS, was Whedon had put some of the same elements in BTVS that I'd found in the X-men? The complexity of plot and character and morality.
The idea that we live in an existentialist universe and all we have is our connections with one another and our own will and knowledge to handle it? And how imposing our will on the universe or others has horrible consequences? Also the idea of the outsider, what it feels like to be unique and different and unable to find your nitch. All of those ideas are deeply embedded in both series. And what attracted me to both I think.

I find I like the pricky characters in both worlds.
The White Queen/Emma Frost who struggles with being a hero and her own selfish interests. She is a lot like Darla and Lilah actually.
The Beast - who struggles with being a smart man in a beast's form and the desire to use science to reverse it as well as the ethics of science.
Cyclops - the leader, who wishes he wasn't, who misses having someone provide him with structure and meaning to his world. Who likes rigidity. And must always be in control or his optic blasts could destroy those around him.
Wolverine - the man and beast merged, who does not know where one leaves off and the other begins. Whose memory is so fragmented and manipulated, he's clueless who he really is.
And whose love of others redeems him, even if he can kill without mercy.
Shadowcat, Kitty Pride - the girl who seems to be stuck perpetually between the ages of 18 and 21. Who can float through walls and make the tangible intangible. Who has dealt with prejudice from two ends - religion and being a mutant.
Yet continues to look at the world with a bright face towards the future, even if she remains uncertain of her role in it or value.

To me it always comes back to the characters. And the X-men have some interesting ones. Mutlifaceated, unpredictable and messy. I prefer the messiness in a way, it's more interesting.
And the X-men are certainly messy.

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

It is confusing.

I'd start with Astonishing X-Men, don't really need the back story to follow it, which is why it's selling so well.

Ultimate X-Men isn't connected to Astonishing X-Men or any of the books. It's a separate universe entirely. The history behind it - is X-men the movie. When X-Men the Movie came out, they decided they needed to create updated and cooler/Gen Y friendly books - so they dressed them in leather and
changed the look and started the story over. It's a good story - but a completely different from the series and no link to what was started in 1960s.
It does work for new readers, because it started in 2000 or thereabouts and has graphic novel compilations for each run of 10-13 mags. But again no link to Astonishing.

New X-Men was Grant Morrison's re-do of X-men.
It started in 2001. And the team was Prof X, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Beast, Cyclops, and Wolverine.
It's a controversial book as you can from the boards.
And is the run that Whedon loved so much and got him reinterested. I stopped collecting during that run.
While it was good, it got convoluted in places, the art work messy, and I felt the characters got lost in the retooling. Very sci-fi. So if you like sci-fi, that was Morrison. Whedon's character conflicts are an off-shoot of what Morrison was doing. And Astonishing I think has taken place of New X-men or it's the team that was in New X-men (not sure what the book is now).

Uncanny X-men dates back to Claremount and Byrne in the 1980s/70s. For a while it was the solo X-men book. X-men branched off of it in the 90s. The reason X-men branched off - was we suddenly had 16 regular characters too many to tell stories in one book. We had the core or original X-men (who'd retired at one point or left to form X-Factor) come back to rejoin, and the new X-men. The old group was Iceman, Beast, Jean Grey, Angel, and Cyclops. The new group was Storm, Colossus (dead now), Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, Rogue (lost her powers), Wolverine, Gambit (wounded), and I've probably forgotten a few. Now Uncanny X-men deals with well
the characters not in Astonishing - probably Iceman,
Nightcrawler, and whomever else they've added.

X-Treme took Rogue, Storm, Gambit, and a couple of others out of X-men and Uncanny. It has a great artist or did in Carlos Salvatorre. But the stories are basic action adventure. Not a lot of depth.

Essential X-Men - is basically summaries of the series as far as I can tell.

Marvel Masterworks X-men used to be and may still be compilations of the old issues in a volume.

The best compilations in my opinion are The Dark Phoenix Saga and The Age of Apocalypse. I can't remember others off-hand. What I'd do is just go to a comic book store and thumb through a few. Or at Barnes & Noble, sit and read a couple of the graphic novels, see what you like.

There's no way on earth you can read the entire backstory. Too many. But there are compilations of it now, so no need to go by back issues like I had to when I started.

Hope that helped a little. Been a long while since
I've looked at my collection and this is pretty much off the top of my head.