|
Adam Besenyodi
|
 |
Re: Deus ex Comica/11 O’Clock Comics Forum Essay Contest
« Reply #11 on: 07:10 AM | Friday, October 02, 2009 »
|
|
Thanks to everyone who entered! Here is the winning entry by Jason Farrell:
Like many before me, I was born a Marvel Zombie. At least it seemed that way, since I gravitated as a kid toward the action packed adventures of characters like the X-Men, Moon Knight and the Punisher. Although I've always collected things, even when I was a kid with no money (bottlecaps and matchbook covers are very cheap), I didn't collect my comics. They were cheap thrills, read until dog-eared and then tossed in a pile, maybe to be traded later with friends. They were action movies I could read. I had a lot of fun with them, but they didn't stick with me. As I got older, they thrilled me a little less each time, and I was less forgiving of some of their more noticeable storytelling "quirks". Then a friend introduced me to Daredevil, during the era in which Denny O' Neil, and then (most significantly) Frank Miller, wrote the book. I loved it. For the first time, it first like a writer wasn't following a "how to write comics" template. The stories stuck with me, rolled around in my head, crawled under the covers with me as I lay down to sleep. I wanted more.
Sadly, my limited imagination and means of transportation as a kid of ten or eleven didn't lead me to actually find more. I bought virtually none of my comics from anything that could be called a comic shop; they were purchased off 7-11 spinner racks and from a used book store. And these places only sold the stuff I was already used to. Having glimpsed something greater, something more meaningful to me, the old fun stories of superteams and high adventure weren't cutting it for me anymore, especially in the face of my burgeoning interest in video games. Comics ceased to matter.
Years later, I was in my early twenties and working my way through college. One of my crappy jobs was selling T-shirts in the top floor of a practically abandoned Mall. The slow trickle of customers left me plenty of time to do homework and gets lots of thumb twiddling done. One day, the guy who worked the shift before me left a little three pack of comics he'd bought at the nearby Waldenbooks under the cash register. Although I didn't actually buy comics anymore, I was very curious to find a few right in front of me. I fished them out. One was some kind of cosmic something or other, with lots of colorful characters delivering long speeches. Next. Another was an X-Men book with a glittering, silvery cover that promised to be "part 10 of 12". Nah. The last book, though, was issue #1 of The Maxx.
Now, 38 year old me has heard of and read books from dozens of comics companies, and seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different art styles. But 21 year old Jason knew Marvel, and kinda DC, and that's it, and had definitely never, EVER seen anything like Sam Keith’s work. Although there was a superhero-like guy called "The Maxx", it was clear even from this first issue that Keith was going for something different than your standard superhero adventure here. I read it a couple of times and I was intrigued.
Unlike when I was ten, I actually had money now (not much), and could go places a bicycle couldn't take me. So, armed with a meager new awareness of the comics of 1992 (namely there's a book called "The Maxx" published by something called "Image"), I headed to a local Things From Another World. Which wasn't called that back then, but my memory fails me. Anyway, I still felt pretty lost as I picked through the boxes, but I got a couple more issues of The Maxx, and a few of Spawn, and probably a couple of other Image books I don't remember now. If that was all I'd bought, my new infatuation with comics might have been short lived. But there was another title that had been mentioned a few times in the Wizard magazine I'd bought after reading the books that day: Sandman.
It was almost an afterthought. But when I located the ten or so issues of Sandman in the boxes, I was immediately thunderstruck. I had never seen anything like Dave McKean's covers, and they held a universe of promise of the riches that might lie within. I bought as many as my budget would allow, and took them home.
The rest, as they say, is history. As revolutionary as those Daredevil issues had felt to me a decade before, they were still just very good examples of the kind of thing I'd been reading. Sandman was something else entirely. I was soon saving up for, and seeking out, every issue of the series I could find. I paid way too much for many of them, but it was worth it to me. Every issue felt like a precious thing. They led me in turn to more Vertigo books, and soon after the light turned on for me for the very first time: "Hey, maybe the fact that Neil Gaiman wrote them is significant". And I've been creator driven ever since.
I have since read many books as good or better than Sandman, but it will always hold a special place in my heart. My favorite thing in the whole damn world was out there, all that time, and if I wasn't for Sandman (and The Maxx), I would have missed it.
|
Dilber MC Theme by HarzeM