I got into this intellectual hole a little while ago where I was doing a lot of reading and writing about the history of Mormonism, Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism and how these shaped political attitudes in the American West. I bought an out of print copy of a good dissertation from the 1960s about the Dust Bowl and changes to federal grazing and range-land policy. I read about Ruby Ridge, the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Bundy family. I read more about nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, about downwinders and the ways our leaders have destroyed our land.
There’s a whole stack of books near my desk at home that recount the neglect of the federal government in supporting the West, and the ways this neglect and apathetic approach to governing and policy enforcement contributed to a kind of right-wing extremism that’s spread like a cancer from the Rocky Mountains outward. I wrote a lot about it, which I hope to start publishing here on this very website someday soon. I dug deeply through tangents and family histories and how land claims worked in the 1800s. I refreshed my knowledge of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and wondered about the connection between hostility of early white settlers towards later caravans on the trails out to California, and the modern hostilities so many in western states hold towards emigrating Californians.
Doing all of that broke my brain a little.
I realized after spending nearly a year trying to read a single novel that I couldn’t read books. My brain was dead-set against it. I’d start novels from writers I liked with premises that interested me and get about seventy pages in before realizing that none of it stuck. I could read journal articles and news just fine, could read the massive amount of information I get on a regular basis at work. I just couldn’t read for fun.
A bit over a year ago, I went to our local comic book store with my husband and picked out a couple of things – some horror comics, Godzilla comics. I wasn’t entirely sure about all of it, but I’d liked some of the issues I’d borrowed from said husband and thought I’d give it a shot. I got a pull box of my very own not long after, having enjoyed the titles I’d selected and wanting more.
A sidenote – comics are their own interesting cultural exchange. It works like this: individual issues come out generally on a monthly basis, and depending on the length of the series the issues are periodically collected into what’s called a “trade paperback” or TPB, as you might see in description information. Trades are great for getting you into a series that’s in the middle of a run. It’s hard to dive into a series at the issue level, since stories are often told in multi-issue arcs.
For example, one of the series I got into is called Something Is Killing the Children. It’s been running for a while, but they happened to have a kind of one-off issue come out as a decent place for new readers to get a feel for the story. I read that issue, found out there were something like eight TPBs already out, ordered all of them and was caught up in the span of like two weeks. It’s an ongoing series, and there’s something maddening and thrilling about now having to wait for each new issue.
A pull box, then, is a system for having your local comic book store set aside issues from series you like. My “pull list” began with the instructions “anything Godzilla” and now I add at least one title a week. This is expensive. I have ended up with comics all over the house, on my desk, in my bed. You can buy boxes sized specifically for comics, and if you fill them you might injure yourself trying to move them. I don’t know that I can necessarily recommend this choice to you.
But my god, the storytelling; comics are a fascinating avenue for artistic experimentation, for unusual methods of moving a reader through a narrative. There are critiques of capitalism, of racism and sexism, there are series that collect short vignettes and stories that celebrate queer joy and issues with some of the most astonishing art I feel guilty having only paid $5 for it.
Comic books fixed my ability to read for fun. I can read novels just fine now, and alternate back and forth between comics and books every time I decide to spend some time reading.
Every Wednesday, without fail, is comic book day. We have a kind of ritual; the husband and I go together, usually after work, and we each pick up our pulled titles, peruse the new releases wall for things that catch our eyes, chat with the employees, and head home. Wednesday is also wrestling night (a topic I’ll write about at some point soon), and getting to spend the evening catching up on story arcs while watching the performative artistry of the talent that makes up All Elite Wrestling is the highlight of my week.
The comic book industry is in rough shape. We’ve never had so many talented writers and artists producing some of the most interesting creative work available. They’re wildly underpaid, and there are all kinds of despicable problems with distributors and with corporate executives putting their grubby hands where they don’t belong. It’s frankly unfair that tech companies whose product is mainly theft are thrown money hand over fist while the people making the creative properties they steal are having to use Kickstarter to fund their art, or GoFundMe to pay for medical bills. It should be a crime.
I don’t have control over that. I do have control over how I spend my money, which is why I’m happy to burn a little on a local business every week, supporting interesting stories and companies trying to publish interesting stories, like Ignition Press.
I love comic book day. I love art, and storytelling, and good writing. I love sharing that interest with my husband, with my friends, with strangers on the internet. It took discovering that joy to fix the thing I had loved for almost my entire life, reading. I think what comic books did for me was this: I had forgotten that reading doesn’t have to be purposeful, that it doesn’t have to be productive or lead to something important. That’s a good use of the ability to read, but it’s not the only thing. You don’t have to have an explanation for what you choose to read.
You can just read a comic book, it’s okay.