Further Confessions OR You Might Be a Geek If You Can Name All These Characters...

Tolkien Boy once told me that if he had invented a fictional character as complex as I am, he would be proud of himself. I took it as a compliment. He was referring, if I recall correctly, to the fact that I am a politically liberal married gay Mormon who listens to rap music, writes angsty young adult literature, and reads comic books. A renaissance geek, if you will.

I remember the first comic book I bought. It was Batman 476, cover date Apr 1992 (though it actually came out in February--that's just how cover dates on comics work), written by Alan Grant and illustrated by Norm Breyfogle (to this day one of my favorite writer/artist teams). On the cover, Batman unmasks himself to Vicki Vale. The character Vicki Vale had only returned to the comics in the past couple years, in response to her lead role in the popular 1989 movie Batman. The movie was also what had sparked my interest in Batman and led me to make the walk down Keeaumoku Street to Jelly's Comics in search of a Batman comic. Sure, I had watched the old Batman show from the sixties, as well as Superfriends, when I was a kid, but that was kidstuff. Tim Burton's appropriately gothic vision of the Dark Knight convinced me that, as a twelve-year-old, I could still think Batman was cool. The comic books I started avidly collecting after that first one reinforced this belief.

You see, the majority of comic books--superhero comics, at least--are written for adolescent boys. Meaning they are written with such a level of maturity to convince teenagers who think they're mature that the comics they're reading are written for adults. The ploy worked on me. I read comics because I loved pointing out to the naive who believed comics were for kids that, hey, the Joker just killed twenty people and Batman said "damn" so of course these aren't for kids.

I could easily psychoanalyze another half a dozen reasons why I read comics as a teenager: they were filled with buff men wearing tights; Batman and Superman became my father figures; the DC Universe, a complex landscape populated by literally hundreds of fictional characters with interweaving backstories, was a fantasy world I could escape to when real life was less than ideal; as an unathletic geek I could live out power fantasies through the aforementioned buff men wearing tights; high school didn't challenge my mind enough so I filled it with trivia such as Superman's height (6'3"), Batman's first appearance (Detective Comics #27, May 1939), and the Elongated Man's secret identity (Ralph Dibny). Okay, I think that was only five, but I could easily come up with a sixth one if I really wanted to. I just don't want to.

At any rate, one has to wonder why, as a going-on-twenty-six-year-old, I continue to read superhero comics. Part of me still wants to insist that comic books are a genuine literary form, just as valid as any other genre or medium. And they are. Some comics, at least, really are written for educated adults. But when I read those comics it's mostly just to prove a point--that such things exist, because I believe they should. The comics I read on a regular basis and look forward to every month are superhero comics, which, no matter how you look at it, are written for teenaged males.

Part of the reason I enjoy superhero comics still is the same reason I got addicted to watching Days of Our Lives with my older sisters when I was ten. No, not sex. It's the serial nature of the genre--when I read a book and I get into a character, I hate to see the book end because I want to know what happens next. I really like that over the past thirteen years I've watched Tim Drake, the latest Robin (as in Batman & ...), grow from an unsure fourteen-year-old to a slightly less unsure sixteen-year-old (I'll save time and aging in comics for another post).

Another part of it, I'm sure, is the nostalgia factor. Reading comics brings me back to my youth. But then, considering how much I enjoyed my youth, I'm surprised I'm not running away from it as fast as I can. Maybe it's just that I'm still a teenager at heart. Hence the writing angsty young adult literature thing, and possibly the rap music thing--the media librarian I work with insists that hip-hop is primarily for adolescents despite my insisting to the contrary.

Then again, maybe it's just that I like shocking people. "You have a master's degree in English and you read comic books?" But I hope I'm not really that shallow.