Comfort Comics

By Karon Flage
March 1, 2006

With Tart Tastes, we focus on great creators and topics within comics. Our opinions often vary in proportion to the diversity of our tastes, but just occasionally we find a subject on which we can all agree! This month we focus on comfort. What are your comfort comics? Those titles that you have read over and over and reach for when you have had a bad day and want to spend some time with old friends.

Leigh Dragoon

My two comfort comics are Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki, and Winging It, by Roberta Gregory. Re-reading Winging It is like hanging out with old friends, and I read Nausicaa when I'm feeling creatively blocked, as it's such an inspiring piece of work.

Rebecca Salek

I have a few old favorites that I reread constantly — usually when I want something to read during lunch or a hot soak in the tub after a really bad day. Among my comfort comics (and, yes, these are all trade paperbacks): the animated-style Batman (DC) collections, Castle Waiting (Olio/Cartoon Books), Hopeless Savages (SLG), Nodwick (Dorkstorm/Henchman), Owly (Top Shelf),ps238 (Dorkstorm/Henchman), Sidekicks (Oni), Sojourn (CrossGen,
I just can't get enough of that art) and Thieves and Kings (I-Box). Oh, and The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (Gemstone), but that's leather-bound and autographed, so it doesn't get anywhere near water or food; I only pull it out to curl up on the couch or in bed.

Same with the massive, single volume Bone; just too unwieldy for the tub; I'm afraid it will go *plop*.

Why are these my comfort comics? I'm not sure. In some cases, they remind of good times in the past. Others hail from the early days when I was just discovering comics; they bring back that sense of awe. Others make me laugh and realize the world isn't such a sad place after all — or, it could be a lot worse, with rampaging armies of Orcs stomping around. But all of them, gosh darn it, are just plain good reading.

Wolfen Moondaughter

Wendy and Richard Pini's ElfQuest is my #1 comfort comic series, particularly the original 20-issue run. (If you are unfamiliar, it's a fantasy series about elves trying to survive in a world of primitive humans while striving to reclaim their heritage.) I started reading the series when I was seven, so I feel like I know all the characters intimately. It's one of the most familar fictional works of my life; I know it forwards and backwards. yet I still never tire of reading it! It allows me to slip into the happier moments in my youth, if only for a little while.

I'm also quite fond of Andi Watson's Skeleton Key, about a girl who finds a magic skeleton costume and key that opens doors to alternate dimensions, and becomes best friends with a kitsune. (Alas, I don't have all the volumes, only the first three graphic novels). The first volume was given to me by a dear friend, and I feel like I'm back home with him when I read it. It's also highly amusing, and has some deliciously angsty scenes as well.

Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2, a hysterical tale about a boy who gets turned into a girl with cold water (and back to a boy again with hot), who has many wacky martial-arts-related adventures, has a similar effect for me. I was introduced to it, one of my first forays into manga, by my friends in college (the aforementioned guy being one of them). Reading the volumes I bought back then allows me to slip into the state of mind I was in when I first read them. And I'm a die-hard Ranma/Akane shipper, so I enjoy it for their love-hate relationship too, not just for the nostalgia.

Kim De Vries

This was a little challenging for me, because I often like kind of edgy stuff which is generally not so comforting. But even so, there are actually some titles I tend to read when I'm not feeling up to facing much. Strangely, they are kind of dystopian, which is quite different from my taste in comfort fiction. When wanting the comfort of "old friends", I often reread Transmetropolitan, Sandman, Finder, and most recently, Promethea.

Transmetropolitan soothes me because it's funny, and comforting to find that at least someone else (Warren Ellis) recognizes how fucked up things are, especially in politics. Also, I like the pictures; so complicated, so much fun to decode! I read Sandman when I want to revel in intertextual connections, in the intellectual game of recognizing literary allusions. Also, Morpheus' angst helps relieve my own. Or sometimes makes me realize I'm being as whiny as he sometimes was. Always this is enriched by lovely artwork. Finder has nice drawings too, and the nicest of all, the wolfishly handsome Jaeger. Many women I know at Tart like Jaeger, but in addition to the eye candy, Jaeger has one quality I really like when I feel stressed: I don't actually have to deal with him! The secret is out, I recognize that Jaeger would not really suit me at all, cute as he is, but as a character, I'm free to admire and even drool, without paying the price of actually having to make any effort of my own.

The previous three titles mainly help me when I can't deal and don't want to face new challenges. (Old challenges are comforting, since I already know what's coming and that I overcame them.) Sometimes though I need comfort that empowers and wakes me up, and I find Promethea really good for this. I think the main thing is that not only is she a powerful heroine, but she is also one of a line of women and a transgendered man who all support her in her own struggles. Nothing like sister/brotherhood (siblinghood?) to make you feel warm and cosy.

I hope none of our dear readers needs comfort too badly; these comics are worth reading even a good day!

Katherine Keller

My comfort food varies on what kind of bad day I've had. Some days nothing but chocolate will do. Other days, I want Kraft Mac-N-Cheese. Same with my comics.

When I'm feeling nostalgic I often dig out the first 20 or so issues of X-Force. Yeah, I haven't read an X Book in about six years now, but the sheer hack and slash intercut with humor and angst of X-Force still hits the right note with me.

When I want something really pretty and sad, I go for the Sandman: Season of Mists trade. This is the arc wherein Neil Gaiman hammered out the exact scope of the story.

When I want a well plotted story of getting away with it, I can't beat "The House of Windowless Rooms" arc in Lucifer.

A year never goes by that I don't pull my battered copy of the Poison Ivy one shot written by John Francis Moore (with beautiful art by Brian Apthorp) off the shelf and fall into the immense potential and tragedy of that character.

Lately however, I've been putting the miles on my JSA trades. So far JSA: Lost is seeing the most action, but only time will tell.

Margaret O'Connell

Since my house is filled with literally hundreds of accumulated comics and dozens of manga and books I haven't read at all yet, I don't make a habit of re-reading things very much unless they're either relevant to an article I'm working on or I'm suddenly struck by an impulse to revisit some particular storyline. Books that fall into the latter category tend to include Carla Speed McNeil's Finder volumes Sin-Eater, Parts 1 and 2, and King of the Cats (Lightspeed Press); most issues of The Desert Peach A Fine Line Press), Donna Barr's improbable mixture of drawing room comedy, tragedy, and (mostly) World War II war story; and some of the earlier volumes of Sanami Matoh's shonen ai manga FAKE (TOKYOPOP).

When it's a question of reaching for something to get me out of a bad mood or wash away the aftertaste of a particularly bad — or well-done but depressing — batch of that week's comics, I'm more apt to turn to my most recent unread issue or issues of a title that has proven to be reliably excellent, usually in a reasonably upbeat way. This obviously excludes just about any of the core Bat-books or Daredevil. I decided to drop the latter in disgust after issue #82, in which the usually admirable Ed Brubaker proceeds to dig DD in even deeper, and apparently kill off a major supporting character, after Brian Michael Bendis had already gratuitously destroyed virtually every aspect of Matt Murdock's life — again.

If I'm in the mood for grim and gritty tales about life in prison, I'll watch Oz or read Steve Gerber's Hard Time (DC), which is a hundred times better than the Daredevil prison storyline to begin with.

I used to hoard issues of the Giffen/DeMatteis period of Justice League International for my antidote-to-a-bad- ood fix. You know, the "bwa-ha-ha" period that was just so thoroughly retroactively discredited and invalidated in Identity Crisis and, especially, Countdown to Infinite Crisis — thanks, DC. I'm afraid the recent "Formerly Known as the Justice League"/"I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League" story arcs in JLA Classified by the same creative team don't have quite the same effect. Perhaps even the original "bwa-ha-ha" stuff was one of those "you had to be there at the time" phenomena. Or maybe the surrounding circumstances have simply changed too drastically to be dealt with by a tongue in cheek "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away"-type disclaimer inserted at the beginning to establish that these incongruously cheerful stories, in which Sue Dibny is still alive and sniping at Maxwell Lord, are flashbacks to an era before DC began ultra-violently deconstructing its entire universe around our ears, allegedly in the name of bringing about a more coherent, less relentlessly grim and gritty new one.

One current comic that usually does reliably cheer me up is Dan Slott's She-Hulk (Marvel), a witty workplace comedy set at a law firm specializing in superhuman legal issues. Here Jen/She-Hulk's more action-oriented ruefully-aware-of-superheroic-cliches adventures are cleverly combined with courtroom scenes where attorneys cite old Marvel comics as precedent and get murder defendants off by enumerating the endless lists of characters who have gotten better after being definitively declared dead. Another such title is Aaron Williams' ps238 (Dorkstorm/Henchman), which is less overtly comedic, but reassuringly free of gratuitous grim and grittiness and psychological trauma. This is a series about a semi-secret public elementary school designed to train and educate the "metaprodigy" offspring of super-powered heroes, villains, and godlike beings from various nebulous metaphysical planes — plus one hapless apparently perfectly ordinary boy whose ultra-super-powerful parents are stubbornly convinced that young Tyler will begin to manifest hitherto latent super-abilities like theirs any day now.

Another title that usually leaves me feeling better is Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung's Young Avengers (Marvel).

This charming, generally cleverly-plotted series combines an underlying optimism and camaraderie evocative of the best Silver Age and Levitz-era issues of Legion of Super-Heroes with a more up- o-the-minute sensibility akin to that displayed in the better episodes of teen dramas such as Dawson's Creek and The O.C. (the latter of which Heinberg actually used to write for). One of Young Avengers' most appealing elements is the shonen ai twist provided by the relationship between boy-next-door teen superhero boyfriends Billy (Asgardian/Wiccan) and Teddy (Hulkling). This relationship comes across as being much more stable and un-superficial than most heterosexual pairings in any of the major superhero universes, including those involving chronological adults like many of the allegedly grown-up Avengers, both old (cough*Hank and Jan Pym*cough* Hawkeye and anybody) and New. (Actually, unlikely New Avenger Spider-Man and his wife Mary Jane seem to be a pretty good couple at the moment, and Luke Cage and Jessica Jones' relationship appears to be working out surprisingly well, considering how unedifyingly it started out back in Alias. But any group that includes perennial playboy Tony Stark/Iron Man and recurring would-be adulterer Wolverine can't exactly be described as notable for solid romantic role models.)