“When I was young I didn’t have much, but I had comics. Friends were hard. Sports were hard. School was hard. Comics were easy.
Back then comics were something to be ashamed of. Comics were evidence that you couldn’t handle the every-day life. If you read comics you weren’t cool. If people found out you read comics, life got a little tougher for you.
So you hid it. You hid your collection. You hid your passion. You hid your nerd.
The end result of all that hiding was alienation, the sadly lingering sense that what you cared about, what really mattered to you was a thing to be mocked by everyone else. You were different. You were stupid. You were odd. You were less.
You were not normal.
Things have changed. A bit. Thankfully. But at its heart, I think comics is still a misfits’ medium. It’s a community of outsiders, a bunch of men and women who, for a myriad of reasons, have trouble conforming to the expected form, who seek a temporary escape from the good, hard pain that comes from pushing against the mold, hoping it’ll finally break.
Somehow panels and words, spandex and punching, they magically ease all that. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to me why. But I’ll take it”.
Tom King
