As you may know, I have a Master's degree in Comics from California College of the Arts, and am working towards a full time career as cartoonist. Naturally, I prick up my ears whenever comics are mentioned on your show. Before this latest episode I'd have said the show generally had a tentative enthusiasm for the form with only a mild negative view of comic fans/comic shops. It was really only in this latest episode that a more extreme negative position towards interactions with other comics people came out. It seems that this is mostly based on bad experiences that Flourish had in comic shops in the past, maybe as many as 10 years ago. That is such a shame, because there are really a huge number of very supportive and welcoming comics shops all around the county. I would know, because not only have I walked into them in the hopes of buying comics, but with the hope of selling my own comics to the shop. I've visited every one of the 10 shops within reasonable driving distance of where I live in the Bay Area, and a few in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Bethesda, Maryland and New York City. Not once have I been made to feel uncomfortable in a shop and not only that, I have never had my work turned away. Every single shop owner I've spoken to wanted to monetarily support the up and coming artists in their area. How many other industries can say that? Perhaps it is relevant to say that I am a nonbinary, assigned female at birth person who uses weird pronouns. Yet I've fallen hard for comics because comics was what took me in as a naive illustration major in despair of ever landing book deal.
Comics are so, so much more than superheroes. The world of comics is so much wider than Marvel and DC. I read 49 comic books in 2016 and only two of them were from one of The Big Two (coincidentally, they were titles mentioned by the Desi Geek Girls- Miss Marvel and Squirrel Girl). Instead of superhero comics I read Congressman John Lewis' heartwrenching biography of violence and bravery as a Civil Rights leader (the three volume March series, from Top Shelf); I read four volumes of John Allison's fabulous webcomic Bad Machinary about a group of elementary school detectives in a haunted town in England (in print from Oni Press); I read Sisters and Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier, two stories of sibling love and rivalry, published by Scholastic Graphix, both of which dominated the New York Times best sellar's list; I read three volumes of Hellboy by Mike Mignola, a series that has been running for over 20 years from Dark Horse; I tried the first volumes of Bitch Planet, Paper Girls, Monstress and Giant Days, all out from Image Comics to rave reviews; I caught up on Saga; I read By Chance or Provenance, a collection of Becky Cloonan's originally self-published short stories; Finder: Third World by Carla Speed McNeil; a comic about the history of Tetris by Box Brown, a whole anthology of queer paranormal romance stories, a comic about people's deepest fears, a comic on film history, a comic about being a tall ship sailor and about three years of James Kochalka's diary comics. That doesn't even include the roster of webcomics that I keep up with (from gay smut like Starfighter to sweet fluff like Always Raining Here) or the huge piles of mini comics and zines I bought and traded for at the six comics conventions I attended OR the political journalism comics I subscribe to on sites like The Nib and Every Feminism!
Comics is a vast, multi-faceted world. Does it have problems? Yes, absolutely. Is it still dominated by white, straight, heterosexual narratives? Yes, but less and less all the time. I read somewhere recently that if you counted all the comic books published on kickstarter as coming from a single publisher, kickstarter now puts out more comics than either of The Big Two. And a huge amount of those books are helmed by queer authors of color, or trans authors, or nonbinary authors. If you spend some time getting to know comics, it will open up around you, offering its many and varied tales. As a professor of mine in grad school said: Comics will love you back.
We don’t have a lot to respond to in this, we were just thrilled to get it and wanted to share it with our readers!
Well, actually that’s not strictly true - partly in response to this and partly in response to another recent listener comment, from @missyuka, Flourish wrote a personal essay about her experiences with comics. So go take a peek at that as well...!
