How’s it going, you fancave spelunkers you?! Ready for our wicked awesome third edition? This week we’ve got Adam Mcllwee, a Pennsylvanian musician that has been reading comics for thirteen years! Click below and enter his fancave!
Joshua Mocle: Tell us a little (or a lot) about yourself?
Adam Mcllwee: Hahaha okay! I’m 21, a senior English major at Marywood University in Pennsylvania, work at a comic book store and play in a band.
JM: How long have you been reading comics?
AM: Well, I started when I was about 8 or 9, and I’m 21 now, so about 13 years.
JM: what initially got you into comics?
AM: I used to watch the Super Friends cartoon (I guess in syndication?) before school every morning, and I loved both the X-Men and Batman animated series’, so they definitely played a huge part. I also remember loving the Batman movie from 1966, but I have no idea how I saw that in the first place. So, TV and movies.
JM: Interesting. What do you think drew you to making the shift to getting stories from one media to another? Was it simply a desire for more, or was there more to it?
AM: It was definitely a desire for more, especially because comics were something I could read at any time. With television, I’d have to wait for the shows to come on, and unless I recorded them there was no way of watching them again, or going back to the parts I liked.
JM: Truesay. What comics are you currently digging a bunch?
AM: Grant Morrison’s Batman books are definitely my favorite, but I’m also reading his Doom Patrol run in trade and love that. I also really, really like Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four story. Secret Avengers and Green Lantern are also great, too.
JM: What draws you to a particular book? Character? Creative team? General content? And how has that changed over the last 13 years?
AM: Sometimes its character, but I think that means a lot less now that there’s so many titles with most of the major characters in them. I used to think that if the X-Men were in a book, that book would have to be good, and now I know that that’s not the case. A book’s creative team didn’t mean much to me up until a year or two ago, but now that plays a huge part in deciding what to pick up. I think creative team ties in with general content, but I also really like being surprised by not knowing much about the creative team and then really liking their comic (Jeff Lemire, Nick Spencer, and even Jonathan Hickman are examples of writers that I knew nothing about before reading their comics, and then becoming an instant fan).I hope that makes sense. I like Grant Morrison a lot now, but I also remember him from writing New X-Men ten years ago, so I had a sense of what his writing was like. Hickman’s Fantastic Four was something that I started buying just because I hadn’t read much Fantastic Four and figured that I’d start with his first issue, but ended up really liking it, making me more inclined to pick up anything he writes.
JM: Well, there’s no shortage of Hickman love at Multiversity, so definitely see where you’re coming from there! Do you read any comics regularly that you actively dislike? And if so, why?
AM: Recently I’ve tried not to do that, but for a while I was reading a few books and it just felt like a chore. I kept buying them either because I didn’t want gaps in my collection in case I started liking the book more or because they tied in with other titles, but reading them and not getting any enjoyment out of it doesn’t really make much sense (which is why I’ve made major cutbacks in what new books I buy, and use the money I’m saving to either try new series’ or buy trades.)
Continued belowJM: Do you think, given how long you’ve been collecting, that you could ever drop comics “cold turkey”? Have you ever tried?
AM: No, I really don’t think so. I didn’t have much money when I started college so I stopped buying comics for a little bit, but that only lasted a year.
JM: A year is a pretty long time in comics!
AM: I know! I reread some old trades though, so I didn’t really stop READING, just buying. But when I started again I felt totally lost.
JM: How did you bring yourself back up to speed?
AM: I was selective about what titles I picked up, and would try and either wait until a new arc began on a book before I bought it again or go back a few issues and catch up on the current story (if I really couldn’t wait)
JM: Fair nuff, fair nuff. Wrapping up, if you had to pick one comic to recommend to someone that has never read comics and indeed is “anti” comics as a general rule, what would it be?
AM: Probably Watchmen, or maybe Brubaker and Rucka’s Gotham Central. I know they’re pretty different from one another, but I think they both show what comics can be as opposed to what someone who is “anti-comics” might think comics are. I’m not saying that they’re the BEST comics (maybe Watchmen is, it’s definitely one of my favorites), but I think they could show someone the potential of comics (especially superhero comics.)
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