As happens with every personally familiar train of thought, I blithely assume that everyone I know has experience with the same set of stories, comics, formats, media, etc., albeit under individually defined circumstances.
As happens with relative frequency about this sort of thing, I am wrong. I feel it important to acknowledge that I am friends with a wonderful woman who also suffers from this forgetfulness when it comes to other people not living with the same set of references. We call each other on it frequently and I’m glad to say that I rely on her to keep my sense of perspective fairly sharp.
(It should be here noted that I am almost always right about everything else in life, although my right-ness does not ever stand on the presumption of someone else’s wrong-ness.)
It always stalls me to realize that other people do not read webcomics every day. That there are people who have been quite happy in their lives without needing to consider the differences in the visual formats of film and paper, even when a film is made to mimic a particular graphic style (à la Sin City and Lord of the Rings). I find myself stammering the names of the same three or four webcomics in no particular order or relevance with the persistence of a Star Wars nerd protesting someone else’s ignorance of The Force: “But Yoda, I mean, Obi-Wan – how could Luke have succeeded at all without it?” Empty words to people with a different context.
Also, I’ve been thinking it would be fun to revisit some of titles I started reading wa-ay back in the summer of 2002, when the world changed forever, and I discovered Sinfest and Scary-go-Round.
I started reading Sinfest and Scary-go-Round in September of 2002 on the advice of a young woman with whom I’d made friends the previous spring. We’d been in an American poetry class together (which was brilliant fun – it was good to be in a place where I could call Whitman a pompous ass and share differently voiced readings of Dickinson and swim in the images of Wallace Stevens without feeling like I’d missed something and be okay with not understanding Howl – it was a class of learning, one of those that set a foundation for future comprehension) and she and her husband were gamers who had found an online source for games that were essentially rules with a set of cards that you bought and played with pieces that came from your own board games. They were good at the cultural possibilities of the Internet, and we were, as yet, not.
One of my biggest struggles at the time was remembering that Sinfest was with a .net, and Scary-go-Round was with a .com. The world before I discovered the purpose of Bookmarks. (Oddly – I’ve still not made good friends with delicious, even though it is so exactly up my alley.)
I have played a computer video game maybe all of 20 times in my life, or, to be more specific: in the 27 years since my mother first brought computer games into the house, I have played something requiring more skill than luck and also pushing more than maybe two buttons less than once a year. And yet, I read Ctrl-Alt-Del, Penny Arcade and Little Gamers like they were the very people who spoke to my soul.
Boy On A Stick And Slither became regular reading about this time, as well.
Finding one comic from another is a piece of cake in web-world, you just follow links that look good, and in 2002 and 2003, archives were just not that long as most of the titles started in the ‘90s. Do You Know How Much That Is Now???? It’s like a month of deliberate reading! Of the same title! Every Day! Madness, I tell you. I read Girl Genius from the beginning just last month, and I thought it would take forever and do you know that it isn’t even close to being done yet and there are Complications! ahead yet! Madness! Madness! That said, I have no idea how I found these pages anymore. None.
My memory tells me that it was about spring or summer of 2003 that I started reading Goats, which kept me happy for a good long time. My generally accepted pattern is to find a new title and then read ALL of it until I’m caught up. In 2003, that meant quite a few happy weeks with Goats. And then somehow there was Something Positive and then Queen of Wands.
Friendly Hostility I found sort of on a whim, I think, and then it was Sam and Fuzzy and MacHall (which, as it happens, makes me smile just to look at (and also distracts me to this day seeing as how I keep flipping over to read more of the archives of Threepanelsoul) (GAH)).
I had time during that time to build quite a reading list, including: Achewood, Diesel Sweeties, Cat and Girl, and Ph.D.
I know that I haven’t talked at all about what makes these fun for me to read, or how they’ve contributed to my sense of culture, art, language, community and story-telling. That’s a whole other set of blogs. And I’m just getting started talking about the titles that got me hooked; y’all don’t even know the rest yet.
I’ll get around to it.
Because I can talk. Really.
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