R. Bennett Furlow

I like comic books. There I said it. I am out of the comic closet. My friends and family know this about me and don’t judge me too harshly. Their nice people. However as I have gotten older I have become a little embarrassed by my like of comics.

I began collecting comics when I was 12 years old. I would ride my bike to a liquor store that had a little rack. It was there I bought my first comic. It was the cover that did it. Here was this beautiful black woman with a stark white mohawk fighting a giant snake with a buck knife. How cool is that?! X-Men #223.

My mom was cool about it and would drive me to the comic book store a couple times a month. We eventually moved from San Diego to Orange County and she continued to take me to the comic book shop and would patiently sit in the car while I searched old comics bins for back issues of X-Men, Green Arrow and Suicide Squad. The things parents do for their children.

As I got older, however, I became disillusioned with comics (now there’s a weird thing to say). The quality declined or my tastes refined or both. Anyway I quit. I was 19, living on my own and decided to put away childish things. Sayonara Professor X.

Then things started to change. I was in a comic book store in Killeen, Texas of all places, when I discovered Warren Ellis. He was doing something really interesting. He was writing superhero stories with political overtones. Hell, if you are bulletproof and can bench-press a tank what is stopping you from overthrowing a corrupt government? Ellis led me to other great works of comic genius such as Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust epic Maus. It is a beautiful and haunting story. I discovered Joe Sacco who created a new form of journalism with his works Safe Area Gorazde and Palestine and Marjane Satrapi’s Iranian revolution memoir Persepolis. And more popular works such as Alan Moore’s gothic From Hell and the noir Torso by Brian Michael Bendis.

The point of all this is that comics are much more than guys shooting laser’s out of their eyes or turning green when they get angry. Comics tell stories just like any other medium. Comics as a field are dominated by sci fi and fantasy but not limited to that. Just like film or televison, a comic can tell any type of story that man can imagine.

I don’t read comics as much anymore. Once in a while I’ll pick one up but I tend to limit them to the more serious stuff. Still, I see that woman fighting that snake and I think of those childhood afternoons in the comic shop, the car rides with my mom and I’ve just gotta open it up to see who wins.