Some of these creators purposefully crusade for these things in the industry, while others find it comes naturally to their work. Whatever the case, they are part of the reason I look forward to the future of comics with a sense of optimism.
Indigo Tribe: Compassion
Comic readers still don’t know a great deal about the Indigo Tribe, who represent compassion (something sorely lacking in this world), are completely selfless, and shun all individualism. While that last part isn’t for me, their apparent goals in the Green Lantern universe are probably the closest to my heart. A lot of people don’t understand compassion – which isn’t pity or feeling sorry for someone. It’s sympathy and empathy, it’s goodwill towards others. It’s putting yourself in their shoes and attempting to understand what they’re going through.
I have a great deal of compassion for women working in comics – and yes, I’m technically a woman working in comics myself, but I’m talking specifically about those who are really in the thick of things, working for comic publishers, or self-publishing their own properties. There are women who write and draw comics, who edit comics, who promote comics, and who are making such strides at giving the comic book industry more gender balance. We can all appreciate their successes, but I feel for them because they chose to work in this male-dominated industry for a simple reason: They love comics and the art form as a whole. They want to be here, and they want to make it better for the next wave of women who yearn to do what they’re doing.
Comics is a tough and intimidating industry to break into, with men still holding the majority of the decision-making positions. A lot of women are self-publishing (a hard road for anyone, even if they’re successful) and showing other women out there that they can do it too.
While it may surprise some, I also have compassion for the comic companies themselves. While they often deserve the flack they get for certain aspects of their marketing or business practices, comic publishing has been struggling in recent years, and that’s a difficult situation for anyone to face as they go to work each morning. Not to mention how they’re on the receiving end of constant complaints from fans about the tiniest changes to comic titles and their characters.
Ah yes, the fans. I feel for them most of all, especially those who have loved comics their whole lives. They have experienced so many more ups and downs through the decades than I have, and from even the little slice of the industry and comic book storytelling that I have witnessed so far, it makes me truly sympathetic to their woes.
Star Sapphires: Love
Love can make you do crazy things, but – despite the purity of their motives – Star Sapphires sometimes take their core emotion to a violent, unhealthy place. They represent the opposite extreme of the emotional spectrum as the Red Lanterns, after all. Thinking in those terms, the love I’ve experienced through comics is often equal to the rage I’ve felt.
I love my blog – without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and it’s a comforting outlet to have. Through my site, I’ve been able to show a large segment of male readers that there were also women who read comics and have the same strong feelings about them. Some have viewed it differently, but my blog title – Has Boobs, Reads Comics – is a satire that says, “yeah, and?” My content showed who I was, my love for comics, and that I was a serious part of the reading audience.
Thanks to my blog, I have met and become friends with industry creators, and formed communities and long-lasting friendships with other bloggers. This happened simply because I was being myself, and sharing my love for comics. A lot of us found our way to Twitter, where even more friendships were made. Of all the things the comics industry has done for me, I’m the most thankful for this – it’s amazing how my love of reading comics (an activity meant to be enjoyed alone) wound up granting me a new, wonderful social group. And introducing people to comics, who may be into other geeky activities but never made the jump, is such a rewarding experience.
I love every minute of this. It’s really a good time to be a comic fan, because right now, Hollywood is scrambling to produce TV shows and motion pictures that are based on comic books. Of course, those shows and movies can be hit or miss, but the public’s enjoyment of superhero and non-superhero comic characters alike has evolved into the wonderful gift of their coming to life on the big and small screen.
All These Feelings Are Exhausting, But Worth It
With every new movie/television show announcement, a funny thing happens. Comic fans go through the entire emotional spectrum. And so do I.
Some people prefer certain genres – horror, drama, comedy, romance, etc. To me, superhero books are the complete package, and Green Lantern is the most all-encompassing package of them all. It has horror, drama, comedy, romance, and more in spades, and it’s always a pleasant surprise to find out which emotions I’m going to feel when I sit down and open up an issue. It’s the anticipation, and the ability to make me feel, that makes me keep coming back for more. Although I wish DC had thought to make smaller replica power rings for tiny lady fingers like my own, I can still imagine playing a part in saving the universe – or destroying it as the case may be – with whatever emotion I feel most connected to.
Green Lantern – and the world of comics as a whole – may be an emotional rollercoaster for me at times, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Jen Van Meter has been writing comics for 15 years. She is best known for her series of Hopeless Savages comics from Oni Press, who jump-started her career by hiring her to write the comic book tie-in material for The Blair Witch Project. She has also written superhero and adventure comics, including Black Lightning: Year One (DC), a Black Cat mini-series collected as Spider-Man: Black Cat, and Avengers: Solo (Marvel).
Welcome, dearies! Your old fiend Auntie Jen’s here to bring you a gruesome tale of surprise, terror, ambivalent social politics, literacy, and suspense! Our story begins long ago, when the Vietnam War was barely over and the President had been caught – as we kids understood it – burglarizing a hotel. People were talking about something called “Women’s Lib” while the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders roamed the earth communicating by CB radio with Burt Reynolds. ABBA and Saturday Night Live were new.
Back then, my little gremlins, grocery stores and gas stations sold comic books on spin racks, the pause button had yet to be invented, and school bullies were accepted as an inconvenient fact of life rather than a problem, in much the way we now regard other people using mobile phones impolitely and ATM surcharges. Also, no mobile phones or ATMs. Strange times these were – marked by wondrous technological advances, international terrorism, an energy crisis, social upheaval over race, class, gender, and sexuality – and the setting for a little story I like to call...
Read on, ghouls and goonies, IF YOU DARE ...
Brent King [22] was my first monster.
When we were in kindergarten, Brent figured out how to fold his eyelids up and roll back his eyes; the pink, raw-looking tissue and bloodshot whites may not have hurt him, but the effect was unsettling and he could hold it for a good 30 seconds. He would do this at the lunch table and dare the other boys to look; if they did anything but grin, Brent would point at them and shout, “You’re a baby! A girl baby!”
Later, he figured out how to stick straight pins through the top layer of skin on his fingertips and wave the painful-looking result in our faces. First grade, if I remember correctly, was all about eating disgusting food combinations open-mouthed, letting the results spill down his chin. Eventually, he graduated to showing off insects he had tortured and other things – worse things – but I’m going to stop there. Suffice to say, Brent had a lot of bits like this and they always came with a dare and a threat, issued only to the boys: Look away and you are a girl baby or a sissy, and, by the end of third grade, a pussy.
I remember feeling grateful that my girlhood let me off the hook as far as Brent was concerned; if I didn’t admire his wet belches and zombie stares, it didn’t change my status in his eye
s one bit. At the time, we girls felt we had it easy compared to some of the boys because they suffered so much more immediately under that measuring gaze. But there was also a tension I don’t think we were then able to articulate, a constant hum of threat; whenever a new girl joined the class, the first thing we told her was to stay near a teacher or a group at recess, to never ever get left alone with Brent.
Almost all the kids were scared of him, certain further torments awaited anyone he deemed deserving. Without ever laying a hand on another kid or directly threatening to, he had us all ducking, and we didn’t question his right to behave as he did any more than krill question a whale’s right to eat them. That’s the thing that pains me most when I recall those first couple years of school: It never once occurred to me to ask a teacher or parent for help, because I saw no indication that they didn’t think behavior like Brent’s was perfectly normal.
I don’t mean to suggest that I was bullied at home – I wasn’t – but the tone of the times was “nobody likes a tattletale,” not “it gets better.” The bully-as-villain characters showed up in kids’ books and television, but usually with a humor beat; we were encouraged to view them as ignorant buffoons to be avoided, bested, or won over, and involving adults was represented as an embarrassment to the whole kid community. When the fictional bullies were truly threatening, the solution was usually a noble bigger kid with bigger fists; no good at all against someone like Brent. I remember once saying something about him to a teenaged boy who lived on my block; he got very grave and asked, “Is he hurting you?” It was comforting to know in that moment that if I’d said yes, this kid would have gladly gone to bat for me, but instead I had to shake my head and watch him frown, uncertain what he could offer. I didn’t have words for what I felt, that Brent was hurting our spirit.
It was a rigged game – a bully’s dare always is. I set the terms, you ante up your reputation, your self-esteem; whether you meet the terms or not, I retain my power position as the arbiter of success or failure, so the house always wins. That contract, such as it is, poisons our positive sense of challenge and risk, our daring, by externalizing its source and changing the stakes. Rather than doing something nervy or new because we want to see if we can, because we’re curious, because we think we should or because taking the risk is kind of thrilling, we start to bully ourselves, thinking instead in terms of the pussies we’ll be – in others’ eyes or our own – if we don’t. Our moxie becomes something more toxic, a losing bet we can keep enacting all by ourselves, even when it drains the delight out of achievement, the thrill out of risk.
What I needed in my life right then was an adult who would confirm that my fear of Brent – of his sadistic need to terrorize us, not his inside-out eyelids and half-chewed food – was reasonable. I needed an adult perspective that could armor me against his assault on my confidence. And in June 1975, I found it in the bottom drawer of a dresser in my great-grandparents’ cabin: three copies of Vampirella, two each of Creepy and Eerie, and one House of Mystery.
It was an old place, and every kid who had ever stayed there had probably left a couple comics behind. Dig to the bottom, and you might find romance and crime comics left there in the ’40s, and layered on top of those an archeological survey of superheroes, Archie, war comics, westerns, Little Lulu, and Richie Rich. Even before I could read, I had enjoyed it as a rainy-day option, but that day I opened the drawer and found these gorgeously lurid painted covers by the likes of Frank Frazetta, Jack Davis, and Tom Sutton, all emblazoned with copy promising outright that the terrifying contents would curdle my blood, tingle my spine, and chill my bones: I opened them and read them. Over and over. Every single one. Later that summer, I would spend all my tooth fairy and bottle-deposit money on more.
But why? Until I encountered those comics, I would have sworn to you that Brent was right about me, that I couldn’t handle being scared, grossed out or surprised. I accepted as facts that I was chicken, that it was because I was a girl, and that it was at once shameful and perfectly normal that this was the case. And believe me, I’m not suggesting that these notions came to me solely from Brent; I’m well aware that he was only parroting something the rest of the mainstream culture was dishing out to us both. So why did I read those comics? Why did I dare?
Because they wanted me to. Right there on the covers: “Come with us, into a world of ghosts, vampires... creatures of shadow!” “Join Us... Beneath the Werewolf’s Moon!” The comics neither knew nor cared that I was a girl, that I was seven, that I hid behind the couch when the winged monkeys appeared in The Wizard of Oz; these books wanted me to read them and admitted it. And inside? A friendly lady vampire, a ghoulish pair of comedians dropping truly terrible puns, and a Bible figure in a mod suit cracking wise about crime and punishment – all addressing me not with a sneer about how I probably couldn’t handle the stories they introduced, but with a promise that I could, and that the payoff would be worth any scares I encountered. As unlikely as it might seem, Vampirella, Cousin Eerie, Uncle Creepy, and Cain – the hosts of these anthology comics – came to form for me a kind of bizarre league of anti-bullies, inverting the oppressive gambit Brent had worked on me and challenging its persistent underlying premise that as a girl I was somehow not up to the task of looking, of confronting whatever might be there to be seen.
In the wake of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements, the horror and suspense genres were having a kind of renaissance; the stuff was everywhere. Here’s how it looked to me, a child at the time: A local TV channel (one of only four) ran five horror movies in a row every Saturday, Dark Shadows came on just after the game shows and before my babysitter’s soap operas, the movie theaters were full of everything from grindhouse to sophisticated suspense, The Exorcist had just won an Oscar, and Carrie was a bestseller. If I came out at night for a drink of water, grownups were watching things like Night Gallery and Kolchack: The Night Stalker.
Maybe it was that sense of zeitgeist, maybe it was just Brent’s setting the terms for what bravery meant, but despite feeling resigned to my scaredy-cat status, I had already been drawn to the horror genre; I suspected there was something in there I wanted, but had come to accept that I did not deserve nor would I find a way in. I had tried some creepy movies and television shows and they hadn’t worked for me; without the now-ubiquitous pause button, they were all or nothing, like roller coaster rides. Once the bar came down and the story started moving, I was stuck, with no opportunity to control the experience short of walking away entirely. They were also humiliatingly social; if it got to be too much, everyone heard me yelp, saw me cover my eyes or leave the theater. Without the freedom to negotiate the terms of the encounter, scary movies and television were, for me, just like Brent: something to be endured, never enjoyed.
I had looked to prose as well, but R.L. Stine and the Goosebumps books were over a decade away, and my reading skills could not yet keep up with the Lovecraft I would one day adore. I had asked our librarian for “something scary,” but the ghost story and folk tale collections she’d found for me were all plot, no suspense. Looking back, I realize the “age appropriate” books she was handing me were written precisely so as to not scare children, but I can’t bear Mrs. Arthur a grudge on that account. I was a little kid, after all. (And bless her heart, it was she who would just a couple years later hand me A Wrinkle in Time, Frankenstein, and The Haunting of Hill House with a sly remark about the sort of literature “nice girls ought to read and write.”)
Not everyone wants or needs what horror has to offer, and I freely admit that there’s much within the genre that is as bullying, sadistic, and misogynistic as anything a hundred Brents could have imagined (though the same can be said of other genres). Beyond the invitational cover copy and non-threatening host personalities, though, those comics and the adults responsible for them gave me information no other accessible source was providing, information I needed:
1. Children can be evil too. And grownups know it. In
these anthology comics, easily every fifth or sixth story featured some sort of “bad seed” kid: sometimes possessed, sometimes the product of abuse or neglect, sometimes an alien, and sometimes just a nasty, horrible person. I found it enormously comforting to realize that the adults listed as writers and editors in the mastheads – Archie Goodwin, Bruce Jones, Nicola Cuti, Louise Jones, Bill DuBay – knew that kids like Brent were possible. The more I read, the more it sank in that if these stories were in a scary comic meant for adults, then perhaps the adults were as frightened of a kid like Brent as I was. Their looking away made a lot more sense in that light, and recast my own fears as reasonable, the product of neither my age nor my gender.
2. You will never see anything as terrifying as what you don’t see. The event between the panels, the contents of the old lady’s basket, the object that everyone is recoiling from, the thing that casts that shadow; all of it is scarier than what’s right there to be looked at, and there’s nothing there at all if you don’t imagine it. I learned this from some people whose names – Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Jeff Jones, Bernie Wrightson, Carmine Infantino, Dick Giordano – weren’t meaningful to me for a decade or more, but whose talent as artists showed me the power of my own imagination as well as the ways in which it could be manipulated by others. They didn’t have to draw the guy getting his head torn off by a werewolf for me to know it was happening; the artists’ slight-of-hand – and, I eventually saw, Brent’s main intimidation technique – was to get me to tell the worst part of the story myself. Making this association didn’t mean I wrote off the possibility that one day Brent would escalate his attacks in dangerous ways, but it did arm me with the knowledge that his power was largely derived from our accepting his terms.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 10
