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My Comics Year: Still Reading

By | December 29th, 2020
Posted in Columns | % Comments

“Because the city that says it’s freed itself of emotion… runs on emotion.”
-“Far Sector” #9, NK Jemisin (Story), Jamal Campbell (Art and Color), Deron Bennett (Lettering) (DC Comics)

In the year 2020, I almost quit on comics. I figure in a year like 2020, one could hardly be blamed for that attrition.

But in fact I didn’t quit. Through anxious days and restless nights, I kept returning to the compulsion to read comics— and not just as escapism. And the fact that I continued to read widely in varieties of comics (graphic novels, superheroes, satire, non-fiction, sci-fi and fantasy…) reinforced to me precisely what role being a comic book reader plays in my survival.

2020 didn’t make me stop reading comics. Instead, this hard year underscored exactly why I read comics:

They are a way we inform, challenge, echo, and defy our imaginations, helping us to make sense and meaning of a world too big to fathom.

All art does this, to be sure. But comics mitigate the pace of visual storytelling media, most of which seems to speed up at uncontrollable velocities. They offer coherence against the chaos of newsfeeds and aggregators and our doomscrolling. And despite how big the blockbuster reach of comic book properties like Wonder Woman or The Boys, they are still the terrain of a (relatively) small and (mostly) inclusive club of weird aficionadxs, mostly in it for the love.

Which means that even after hours reading Ed Yong COVID pieces in The Atlantic or CDC guidelines, my unconscious still hungered for G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward’s “Invisible Kingdom” or Tom Taylor’s “DCeased.” Even after I spent myself worrying about how we were educating youth through these painful and distant times, I then found myself intensely curious how Eve Ewing was writing teens in crisis in “Champions” or how Laurie Halse Anderson and Leila Del Duca’s “Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed” would portray coming of age out of isolation or abuse. And even when mobilized against racist disparities in the valuing of lives or attacks on institutions of democracy, science, and civic cohesion, I would still hanker to keep reading Walker, Brown, and Greene’s “Bitter Root,” Liu and Takeda’s “Monstress,” Ahmed and Garron’s “Miles Morales,” Gay, Oliver, and Kirby’s “Sacrifice of Darkness,” Backderf’s “Kent State, and on and on.

Living amid crisis piled upon crisis in 2020, I often felt too overwhelmed to bother with Metropolis or Krakoa or Usagi’s animal Japan… until after I washed hands for 20 seconds, utilized the PPE, finished the Zoom call, and found myself at the end of the day with a lingering longing to find myself in someone’s strange world. And there I was, back in the hands of Bendis or Hickman and Howard or Sakai again.

During this brutal year, comics are where my imagination would come home to, finding a companion who speculated or disturbed or made light or got angry next to me. About death’s nearness or environmental collapse, as Deconnick and Rios’s “Pretty Deadly” or Daniel Warren Johnson’s “Wonder Woman: Dead Earth” provided tones to my somber thoughts. About civic strife or abuse of power, as Brown and Prenzy’s “On the Stump” or Zdarsky and Chechetto’s “Daredevil” mirrored my outrage and helplessness. About how surreal a pandemic life and an election year could be, as Olivia Jaimes’s “Nancy” or the folks at “The Nib” would excavate a grin out of the demoralization of the moment. About how sacred life felt and how necessary our bonds of parenthood or friendship or partnership, as everything from Leong’s “A Map to the Sun” to Kirkman and Samnee’s “Firepower” elicited those pangs of relationships treasured or missed.

In other words, I found that I didn’t need comics to provide drama to my world. None of us did, really. Comics served instead to amplify, evoke, embody, and encounter the emotional layers that were shell-shocked by the waves of explosive news or tucked away for the urgencies of health or employment. They worked like dreams that sorted the intractable bigness of thoughts.

And what I found is that this medium where creators could unleash so freely and wildly became all the more important when I needed to find moral courage. Emotional bandwidth. Improbable hopefulness. So I kept on reading.

Continued below

Not that 2020 didn’t upend my comics life. I did have to be more scarce in the discourse about comics that I usually enjoy. I had to halt the Comics Syllabus podcast, hosted here at Multiversity, leaving a gaping hole in my heart. (Though no such opening exists in my schedule, sadly.)

Then there was the promise of virtual conventions, standing in for the in-person cons I could never attend. These seemed to dangle a chance to exercise my fandom from my living room. But after the fifth SDCC Zoom call that looked just like my work meetings and awkward family gatherings, flattened on that same screen, I just couldn’t anymore.

But that disappointing loss of comics community just revealed the purity of my impulse to actually read comics. Stripped of the obligation to stay abreast of the MCU or latest Fantagraphics releases for a podcast or a chat at the LCS, I found myself still intensely curious— maybe even in a more pure way— what my favorite comics creators had to say about Afrofuturist visions or who survives a climate armageddon, about plutocrats on a reality show island or how a Canadian First Nations communities dealing with fracking.

Social media seemed to enclose our bubbles. Comics burst them or pushed us beyond them. Quarantine made our worlds small. Comics made them multiversal. Irresponsible leaders tried to dissolve our sense of trust and reality for short-term wins. Comics exposed such power grabs for what they were, and amplified brave voices that preached humbler heroism or more demanding perseverance.

So this year more than ever, through catastrophes where my IRL communities proved their strength more than ever in my forty years, I also have many to thank in the comics realm (my “Super Friends”) for aiding our collective survival through these wilds and for MY still carrying on with a measure of hope.

A sampling of those shout outs, comics that made me hold on and believe in 2020, in no particular order and side-by-side with works name-dropped above:

(These are a few of my favorite things in comics this year):

  • First Second’s new line of civics comics, such as Newman and O’Connor’s “Unrig” and Levinson, Levinson, and Shwed’s “Fault Lines in the Constitution.”
  • Vita Ayala’s comics output and new projects on the horizon, like “Submerged” and “Quarter Killer” and “New Mutants.”
  • Multiversity’s Greg Matiasevich’s Shelf Bound columns inspiring my own binds of most of the original Milestone Comics series from the 90s… and then hearing that Milestone’s coming back!!!
  • Tributes to John Lewis from the comics community and especially collaborators Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin.
  • Though I have no idea what’s happening in the story, Mike Huddleston’s art, Sasha Head’s design, and Rus Wooton’s letters on the Jonathan Hickman scripted “Decorum” are incredible.
  • Some graphic novels that held me captive this year: Kiku Hughes’s “Displacement,” John Jennings and Damian Duffy adapting Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” Katriona Chapman’s “Breakwater,” and Jennifer Muro’s “Primer” DC kids graphic novel.
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bob Quinn making Daughters of Liberty the center of “Captain America.”
  • Gene Luen Yang being not only an incredibly great writer, but simultaneously, a conscientious board member during the CBLDF’s overdue reckoning for Charles Brownstein’s harassment.
  • Mariko Tamaki’s “Wonder Woman” run,
  • The community and creators rallying not to countenance harassment and hate groups or publishers who support them.
  • The huge family and spy fun of Tatsuya Endo’s “Spy x Family” on Shonen Jump.
  • Comics writer and Central Park birdwatcher Christian Cooper’s “It’s a Bird,” drawn by Alitha E. Martinez and Mark Morales, conveying the experience in fictionalized form after the video went viral of the white woman who called the cops on him. For asking her to abide by the dog leash rules.
  • And much more that got me through the year.

Crises are crossroads to help us re-evaluate our habits. I could have so easily jumped off comics this year. Comics like these kept me from that leap. I imagine that, if you’re reading this, you may have found yourself similarly rescued.

As we round the corner to (fingers-crossed) better times, let’s keep reading.


//TAGS | 2020 Year in Review

Paul Lai

EMAIL | ARTICLES


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