COMICS CULTURE SHRAPNEL from CBEM 286
I'm sorry to say that I haven't been to a comic shop this week. Not at all. I am totally ignorant of whatever came out this past Wednesday. How dare I write this column! I am ignorant and out-of-touch. Or something like that.
Of course I have a perfectly good reason for shunning my hobby this week: midterms. I know myself well enough to know that new comics and studying just don't mix. Biology versus Transmetropolitan - no contest.
It's always been the case for me. How many tests have I failed because I was reading JLA instead? Quite a few. And that's not counting all the times I didn't pay attention in class because I was busy indulging in adolescent power fantasies in my head. I used to count the days and class periods until a new issue of Impulse or Generation X came out. Every Wednesday at lunch I used to run out of school, whooooooosh to the store, then spend a few minutes casually browsing the shelves ... after which I whooooooshed back to school, where I would plop down in an empty corner in the hall and happily content myself with Sandman or Scud or Flash, until the bell rang and I was forced back into class.
Sometimes I would bring them with me into class. Drafting class (yes, I actually had this subject) was always a nice place to read comics, laying them out flat on the drawing table and pouring over each page. I sat in the back and the teacher rarely ever left his desk. It was the perfect combination.
But for the most part, comics and school have always been mutually exclusive in my life. There was never any room to combine the two.
Until college.
College is weird. It's school, but not. The courses have weird names and people generally do whatever they feel like, which actually extends to what you could do in class. The projects you do, the papers you write, there's more freedom there. Which is where comics come in.
I was in a writing class and our essays could be about anything we wanted to write about, so long as we followed the style guidelines laid out my the teacher. Anything. I started out writing about serious, contemporary subjects, but found comics sneaking in there more and more. And my grades started getting better. I felt guilty. I felt weird. It just didn't seem right. Did I stop? No way. Just last week I wrote a "stylistic analysis" of Wizard. I've incorporated the Fantastic Four into literature papers and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac into sociology. I've been told to write from experience by numerous teachers, and like it or not, comics are part of that experience.
Which is why we shouldn't feel guilty or ashamed to say we like comics and incorporate them into our schoolwork, whether it be college or high school. For the most part, teachers want you to be interested in the work you do, and they want you to think. By writing coherently and intelligently about the comics you read, you've proven that they have depth and maturity beyond the stereotypes your teacher or professor may have. Additionally, you've also proven that you have a brain too. Despite the fact that you read comic books.