Comix

Alan David Doane is fed up with comics:

The thousands of dollars a year I once spent on comics will now be spent on other things. Rent. Groceries. Maybe the occasional movie. I still crave works that fire my imagination. I am as fascinated by the process of creating art as I am the art itself. Moreso, really. The mysteries of imagination seem like a puzzle too complex for human minds to ever fully decode. I can’t just watch a movie or TV show and lose myself in it, I am constantly pondering the process of its creation. There aren’t any superhero comics anymore that beg that question the way Kirby’s did, or Ditko’s, or whatever genius you think of when you think of the gods of comics creation. I do know that few walk the earth anymore. Fewer still seem to aspire to the heights those gods once reached.

I know the feeling. For me I reached it one sunny day in 2000 at the Haarlem comics con when I suddenly and utterly became fed up with comics: reading them, collecting them, byuying them, thinking about them. I just stopped going to my local comic shop and stopped cold turkey. This didn’t last too long, but for a couple of years I paid no attention whatsoever to comics and felt the better for it. If you have an obsessive personality, the fanboy mentality, comics can leave you feel as bloated and nauseous as gorging yourself on junk food does. Especially during those times, like now, when comics don’t seem worthy of such an obsession.

Of course much of that problem is being obsessed with superhero comics, which even at their best are apt to be unworthy of such devotion, disposable mass culture filler that they are. Having that week in, week out involvement with Marvel or DC superhero fandom, with the constant bombardment of low level manipulation and betrayal, all those cynical event comics that never change anything or are remembered a year after, the rape as plot device, all those deaths of minor characters to show how evil the villian du jour is, all that relentless negativity that being a fan of mainstream superhero comics entails, that wears a body down.

Best thing anybody can ever do is stop doing that weekly grind and just follow comics from a distance. That’s what helped me get back to comics: no more buying floppies, just getting those collections or trades that looked interesting to me as I came across them, and bugger trying to keep up.

for some people, it seemed, being a nerd, a geek, a gamer was something they could play at whenever the mood struck. When it didn’t, they got to be normal.

Elizabeth Simins’ Manic Pixel Dream Girl comic touched a nerve, especially the bit quoted above. Simins was talking about growing up as a girl gamer back in the nineties and early naughties and her efforts to fit in and be a “fake normal girl” and how that influenced how she thought about the recent fake geek girl controversy. Gaming in the nineties was very male orientated, with the industry happy to pretend only boys played videogames. Plenty of girls may have played Tombraider too, but you wouldn’t know it from the tits, tits, tits ads. And though there’s still a lot of obnoxious sexism in gaming, it’s much more acceptable and unremarkable these days to like games as a woman.

In general, nerdy things have long become mainstream and now you have the beautiful people, the cool kids arguing that, they too, are geeks. Which can cause unjustified resentment by those who always were outcasts, who grew up when being geeky was strange. It’s a stupid thing to think, to be jealous rather than glad that so many people can embrace their inner geek without being mocked for it, but it’s there and Simins captured it perfectly.

But go read Manic Pixel Dream Girl, as it’s much more than just that.