Seeding the Field

[dave]

What first hooks a reader on comics?

In an interview I gave a few months ago to Graphic Novel Reporter, I was asked the following question:

Do you remember your very first comic book? If so, what was it?
I’ve revised this answer a number of times, frankly, and not because I’m being coy. For a long time, I considered it Fantastic Four #293, which my mother bought for me while I was sick and home from school. That’s definitely the first comic I paid any attention to for the characters and story and so forth. But she got that for me because the local convenience store was out of the Larry Hama G.I. Joe comics I loved and collected since, maybe, issue #34 in 1985. (Of course, I bought loads of back copies through the mail from Mile High Comics thereafter, including “the silent issue,” #21.) I was reading that and Secret Wars purely for the action figure tie-in, you see, and for the longest time, I thought that toys were my “gateway drug” to comics. However, at a recent garage sale, I found these two Book & Record Sets from Power Records! featuring Batman and Spider-Man, respectively. Wow, my entire brain defragmented to find some precious memories of these stories. Truly, these were ground zero to my comic-book reading, it seems. Unless you count this:

I share that, spandex and all, not to further embarrass myself (though I was rather cute) but, instead, to pose the question both for current readers and for attracting the next generation. What is it about comics that sinks its hooks into people? Speaking and devotees, can we articulate the early allure?

An artist perspective:

Perhaps when I was young I gravitated to comics because it was the idea it was like a cartoon, only with words.

I was obsessed with animation when I was a kid and wanted to be an animator when I grew up. I wanted to draw what I loved the most, cartoons. Now as a good stand in for this dream, I made comics with my cousin to convey stories and have an excuse to draw my favorite characters over and over again. [My cousin also wanted to be an animator as well.]

The comics that appealed to me were the newspaper kind. Since they resembled the kind of cartoons I was into. [i.e. Disney --the movies and the shorts, Warner Bros, Fleischer, and so forth.] Garfield was my favorite as a kid [i know, embarrassing] - but it was probably because he was so accessible to draw and to understand [story wise.]

It's worth noting I had respect for super hero comics growing up - my mom had/has a box full of old comics from the 50s-70s [then 80's-late 90's] that were varied. I just never had an urge to read them because they didn't interest me like my cartoonish stuff. I was never into "violence" [i use this term loosely. Through a child's perception of what those books were about.] so there was no reason to read about super heroes.

[Random: I had a stint into mainstream comics in 95- picked up a few X-men issues. Then I never picked them up again. But knew of some of their histories, and delighted in knowing stupid nerdy stuff like that. I think the cartoon had something to do with my interest too. I also tried my hand at drawing more super hero like comics at the time as well.]

At one point i gave up my dream on being an animator. [didn't want to re-draw frames over and over again. boring!] I had always made comics growing up, and my own original stories and never gave that up.
I think i was always destined to do comics, though I could have sworn I'd also be more of a fine artist as well [which one day i'll try to do more fine art.]

So here i am, a comics creator?

-Chan

*p.s. It's worth noting my cousin, Lindsay Cibos, also became a published comics creator as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peach_Fuzz

[dave]

*p.s. It's worth noting my cousin, Lindsay Cibos, also became a published comics creator as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peach_Fuzz

Invite her by and pose the question to her, too!

*p.s. It's worth noting my cousin, Lindsay Cibos, also became a published comics creator as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peach_Fuzz

Invite her by and pose the question to her, too!

getting her is like pulling teeth. she also has carpal tunnel, and unlike me, is smart and doesn't type often at all.
Couldn't even reach her via phone to wish her a happy birthday.

[dave]

Related to this topic, I recently had a new collaborator of mine ask for advice on how to get his fiancee more interested in the medium; she's supportive of his work and finds his art lovely, but she doesn't have any sort of visceral feel for the experience of reading and enjoying comics.

At first, this November Newsarama article occurred to me (which had springboarded off this Mightygodking post...which was in response to The Onion AV Club's "Best Comics of the '00s" article...which, I believe, was a translation of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes). But, my thought was that she might not be particularly the superheroic type (even though he mentioned her fondness for Star Trek at times). So I said:

One thought: Best way to convert a new reader like [name withheld] is to go both top-down and bottom-up. That is, we can match her with the "great comic" that we think best suits her (PERSEPOLIS? WATCHMEN? MAUS?), but we should also find some way that comics have already infiltrated her life, potentially. Did she see either GHOST WORLD, THE ROAD TO PERDITION, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, or MEN IN BLACK in the theaters? Plant the seed that these originated as comics (or that Peter David, a major Trek novelist, is also a big comics writer), y'know?

Your advice, folks?