Making the Extraordinary Ordinaryor, why a literary writer got into comics
This is a bit of a chicken and the egg question, "How did you get into comics?" It's like asking, "How did you realize that you're a writer?" "When did you get into art?" or "How did you figure out your sexual orientation?" Nothing triggered it directly. There was a long, gradual process to discovering that, despite being passionate about many things, comics are one of the simple pleasures in life (like great food or hiking to a stunning wilderness vista) that make me perennially happy. Does this make me a black sheep? I confess that the label "fangirl" makes me squirm. A lot. So does "secret origins", even when I know it's tongue and cheek. You see, I'm not terribly secretive — I like my real identity a hell of a lot. There is only one person on this planet with my name and I'm fiercely proud of the odds I've overcome, so I've never wanted to be anyone else. Maybe this is why I could never dig superhero fantasies, but lean more toward their root material of mythology and folklore instead. Because I'm a sucker for magic/k. And comics are pretty damn magickal. My life has never been ordinary, and I suppose the extra-ordinary nature of comics, the magic of constructing a moving world in your imagination between the panels, speaks to me more on an everyday level than pure words as literature. I relate to strange circumstances, I relate to being the foreigner, and I relate to having qualities out of the ordinary. Unlike most people in the United States, I've lived through harrowing events worthy of a Mars, Utena, and Basara — and they were not fun, believe me! Maybe when you've had an extraordinary life, you search for something that can tell you about being "normal" under your circumstances — something that relates to what you've lived through, that you just can't talk about with "ordinary" people. They wouldn't understand — because in their lucky world of normalcy those sorts of things only happen in news stories, movies, or books — never to "real" people, the ones you know. Comics, anime, and manga plot lines have an uncanny habit of exploring the lives of characters under bizarre circumstances trying to fit in, whereas literature explores what happens to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. Maybe that striving for normality is what makes me run for the hills when someone else dons a costume without pay or starts speaking medieval screed to invoke divinities. It certainly makes me flee from other labels, like "fangirl". Do I have to be a fan? Of anything? Why can't I just love stories and art and have fallen madly, madly in love with their exquisite bastard child, comics? "Fan" is such a loaded term, bordering in our own culture on becoming what the Japanese have long labeled "otaku" — an obsessed fan, consumed by their love of media. I'm not a fan of anything. I just like creativity: both mine and other people's. I'm bad at conventions because I'm both terrified of the all-consuming nature of geekdom and I really, really love comics in equal measure — the same way that I love Shakespeare done well on a stage, a good translation of Sappho, a piece of gripping investigative journalism, fabulous cinematography on a big silver screen, or looking at an actual O'Keeffe or Dali with all the nuances of color depth that ink on a page just can't reproduce. The difference between my love of comics and my love of other forms of art and storytelling is that I can burrow under the covers with a cup of tea and the warm glow of a salt lamp and relax while reading a volume of Basara at my own pace, filling in the blanks with the power of the artist's suggestion, whereas I have to go out and not relax to take in one of the other experiences mentioned. I may like Ursula K. Le Guin's more political writings and the fiery magic realism of a Salman Rushdie novel but they don't help me unwind after a long day of work. Cormac McCarthy has taught me a hell of a lot about the simplicity of good prose, but plunging into the world of All the Pretty Horses is anything but relaxing. So there's also this ridiculously well-educated, academic side of me that spent over eight years in college and the total kid side of me that still has a subtle Vampire Hunter D keychain that don't get easily rectified in our culture. (I wrote an aborted academic thesis on bishonen when I was 22 and an Animerica article exploring Japanese literary and aesthetic archetypes I once intended to become a book.) I'm not in the closet about liking comics: I've wanted to make a living at them as a writer, artist, and journalist for as long as I can remember — the second I realized I was not, in fact, going to school to become an archaeologist because I liked making up stories about life even more than reconstructing them. No secrets and no fangirl, here — just a woman who really loves stories and great art, and couldn't be happier than when they dance together in comics.
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