Secret Origin of a Fangirl

It Was a Relationship that Blossomed on the Web

By Jennifer Franklin Elrod
March 1, 2007

It's safe to say that, if not for the web, I wouldn't be a comic fan today. For me, comics would be something that occasionally inspired movies that I enjoyed, like The Matrix and V for Vendetta. Comics would be something that I didn't read, other than the occasional literary exception, like Maus. Comics would be something stored in boxes in the basement, preserved in their plastic covers, except when they were removed and viewed once in a while, like old family photos.

Before there was a web, I wasn't always cut off from comics. I read comics in my childhood. They were like candy to me. They weren't as available as books, but when they were around, I couldn't get enough of them. One of my aunts has a memory of meeting me for the first time when I was a little girl. "You just sat there reading comics the whole time," she told me. I recall how wonderful it seemed to me that she and my uncle had a whole barrel full of comics in their basement. I made countless trips back and forth from that barrel, carrying stacks of comics in my greedy little hands, blissfully unaware of my rudeness.

My easy access to the world of comics during my childhood was a part of a larger harmony between words and pictures. All the fiction books I read had illustrations in them, too. When I look back at this time in my life, I see myself as a little girl, standing in the library, watching a girl several years older check out her books. I notice that her books are different than mine. They are smaller yet a lot thicker. I find a book on the shelf that looks like her books, and I flip through the pages. The pages are full of tiny text and devoid of pictures. I hate them. I resolve that I will never stop reading books with pictures.

In childhood, the harmony between words and pictures held equally, whether I played the creator or the consumer role. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" a grown-up would ask me. "I want to be an author and an artist," I would usually answer. I made little books with stories and illustrations in them. I didn't know yet that grown-ups are expected to specialize. I didn't know that writers are not supposed to be good at drawing. I didn't know that artists are not supposed to like to write.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep my childhood resolution never to stop reading stories with pictures. If I had been born ten years later, maybe I would have read manga in my teens, just as naturally as I read Lord of the Rings, Little House on the Praire, and Jane Eyre. As it was, I stopped reading comics, and I stopped reading illustrated fiction, too. I nearly stopped drawing, but I kept writing. When I went to college, I finalized the divorce between pictures and words when I chose my major. I picked writing over art, reasoning that I only had time for one major. During these years, I read few comics, and I did little drawing. I was a regular reader of Mad Magazine, and I drew occasional caricatures of my family and co-workers.

Comics were not a part of my college education, with one exception. In a creative writing class, the professor gave the class an assignment to create a short comic during one hour. Most of the students, including me, did not try. We blew off the assignment. Maybe our lack of effort was a cover for lack of skill and familiarity. Maybe it was a sign of lack of respect for the comics medium. Maybe it was both. In any case, the professor interpreted the sorry results of her assignment as a clear message that we students lacked respect for comics. I had never seen her so livid before, except once when she had caught a student plagiarizing. She held Maus in the air as an example of what a comic could be. I got her point that comics are an art form equal to any other, but I learned nothing about how to create or interpret comics. That education would have to wait for independent reading of Scott McCloud's books, after college.

Just before graduating from college, I began dating the man I would marry. He had an extensive comic book collection, the legacy of his addiction to reading comics and investing in them during the comic investment boom. When we moved into our first apartment, he brought a pallet full of long white boxes full of comics. My current love of comics didn't start back up with the boxes of comics, though. It started with The Tick.

When he told me about The Tick cartoon that he had just started watching, I was uninterested in it at first. But the way he described it, it sounded so funny to me, that I decided to try it. I loved it from the start. The sensibility of The Tick, with its tongue-in-cheek treatment of heroes and villains, appealed to my sensibility at that time. I had grown very critical and sarcastic. At the same time, I did not take life seriously, since I felt that I was just rehearsing life, anyway. The Tick somehow spoke to all the feelings and attitudes I had at that time in my life.

Sometimes, to laugh at a thing is not very far from appreciating it. Sometimes we become fond of the things we laugh at. After laughing at The Tick, I began to enjoy movies like Batman Returns. The Spawn and X-Men comics that were part of my new love's collection also impressed me. I realized how much I had missed as I had gone about my business ignoring comics over the years. I was particularly fascinated by the character development of Spawn. Here was a character difficult to put in a box. He had all the ambiguity and irony you could ever want. X-Men character development also demonstrated more sophistication than good vs. evil. My mind was more open to comics than it had been since childhood, but I was still not an avid comics fangirl yet.

It was the web that ultimately got me reading comics again. By this time, it was looking as if the web would be my primary platform as a writer, too. In college, I had vaguely dreamed of writing something postmodern and literary. It would not have any pictures, of course. Now I began to dream of making a story that could only exist on the web. Why shouldn't it have pictures, I thought, especially when I realized that I, myself, was far more likely to read a web comic than a piece of amateur all-text fiction online. I had come full circle. I had returned to my childhood dream of writing and illustrating fiction. Of course, as I have since learned from Scott McCloud, a comic is more than the combination of words and pictures. It is sequential art.

When I began to read web comics, I was drawn to science fiction more than any other genre. Some of my favorite sci fi web comics include Finder, Zot! Online: "Hearts and Minds (2000)" and Nekko and Joruba. Reading web comics led to seeking out the printed form of sequential art. Favorite comics and graphic novels include The Sandman, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, A Distant Soil and Wasteland. I like slice-of-life and funny comics, too, but my favorite stories are big and imaginative.

As I became interested in web comics, I learned of the work of Scott McCloud. I read Reinventing Comics first, since my first interest is the future of storytelling on the web. Next, I read Understanding Comics. I'm currently partially finished reading McCloud's latest, Making Comics. His books struck a chord in me. I personally identify with his exposition of the history of the integration, separation and re-integration of words and pictures in human history. I feel almost as if my own story is a miniature and individual version of this history. I also feel inspired by McCloud's vision for the still largely unrealized potential of the medium of sequential art. After all, if everything good had already been done, what would there be to look forward to doing or reading?

I look forward to the future development of sequential art both online and offline. I feel excited to be a part of this development, both as a fan and as a creator. One reason I feel optimistic is that I believe that the online world will forge attitudes that are carried offline. The attitudes I expect to increasingly flourish within the comics community will be colored by the free culture of the web. The web makes it a commonplace that every individual can have an influence as a creator of their shared culture. As people increasingly experience this creative freedom online, I believe they will realize that they can have more of this freedom offline, too. Because of the resulting pace of change, no publisher or creator will have a long-lasting prior claim as gatekeeper of a whole art form. Prior claims will be swept away by fast changes. It is a good feeling to know that there will be no lack of interesting new things to read and see. It's also a good feeling to know that there is so much yet to be done, by so many people, and that I will be one of those people.

There is a final note I want to add, since this is a story about coming full circle back to childhood attitudes, only with deeper insight this time around. I'm happy to be back in a place where art and stories are first and foremost fun and imaginative.