Peiratikos

Child-demons Sue Storm and Reed Richards invent horrible new sexual positions!

Over in the comments thread of Jeff Chatlos’s post about why so many people don’t read comics, Jeff asks Rose:

Rose: I’m VERY interested to hear what got you interested in comics in your 20s, and what your perceptions are as a latecomer. I look forward to reading what you have to say, either here or at your blog.

I am not, in fact, Rose, but I also started reading comics when I was 20 years old (about two years ago), and I’ve had some thoughts lately about how this affects my perception of all things comics. Actually, it’s partly Rose’s fault I started. I think the first comic I read as an adult was Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, specifically the Wonder Woman-Superman sex scene. Rose and a friend of ours showed this to me, I have no idea why. (That was also when I first learned that superhero comics aren’t just for kids anymore. I was barely aware Superman comics were being published, let alone ones in which he and Wonder Woman destroyed mountains wth their mighty orgasms.) The second comic I read was Transmetropolitan. I’m not sure why, but I think because it was just about the first comic I heard of that wasn’t a superhero comic and I was intrigued by the idea. At first I avoided superhero comics because I figured they were probably pretty dumb, but then Rose made me read Young Justice and next thing you know here I am with a copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths on my bookshelf.

Now, first of all, the fact that I began reading comics as an adult means I don’t have the baggage of exposure to Rob Liefeld at an impressionable age. I suspect a great deal of the “Superheroes are for kids, quit reading that crap!” criticism I see is driven by the deep-seated embarrassment of people who read X-Force when they were kids. On the other hand, it also means I never developed a childlike emotional attachment to any characters. This seems to be a fairly common criticism of adult ‘fanboys,’ that they’re emotionally stunted losers who continue to read superhero comics because they’re obsessed with Superman. In fact, I avoided superhero comics (motivated by exactly the sorts of stereotypes I mention now) until Rose showed me some good ones. At the same time, she gave me lots of non-superhero comics (e.g. Kabuki) and small-press and minicomics. So I started reading as an adult with fairly sophisticated critical faculties, I expected superhero comics to be bad by default, I had someone to expose me to a wide variety of comics and help me avoid the really bad stuff, I haven’t had a chance to get burnt out (which seems to happen rather frequently among longtime comics readers). I do think all this gives me an ‘advantage’ over people who’ve read comics since they were children, in that I just haven’t had the opportunities to build up bad baggage with superhero comics. Now, if I had read X-Force as an impressionable young lad, would I now scorn superhero comics as childish trash? I have no idea, obviously, but I do think my late arrival to comics played a large role in non-scorn of superhero comics.

Occasionally I take a look at the search engine keyphrases that bring people to Peiratikos and find some that I just have to share!

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It just goes on and on! I hope you all found what you were looking for, folks.