Oh Hi, there I didn’t see you there because I was watching a Tik Tok with my airpods while doing a dab.
Yes. I’m Gen Z and at the beginning of this decade, I was 11 years old.
Looking back on this decade has caused *quite* the existential crisis, because so many people older than me sharing the things they’ve accomplished in the past 10 years and they are good, adult, accomplishments like getting that one job or getting married and I have been torn between thinking I haven’t accomplished much and oh god most of the life that I can remember happened in this decade and is chronicled on the internet forever. Existence in the 21st Century is hell. Comics have been a constant throughout and maybe by focusing on my life as a human through them will make me not want to scream into the void.
Ten years ago I remember going into a comics shop and seeing him on the cover of “Teen Titans” #69. A new “Teen Titans” line up was rolled out featuring THE Black superhero. Being a Black kid who watched tv in the 2000s, it was all about Static. I had the DC Animated Cartoons, Encyclopedias, and wells of Wikipedia pages that gave me a decent background of the DC and Marvel stomping grounds but oh baby seeing the Proto-Black Spider-Man, Static rolling with a classic DC super team was so new and surprising (and not on Wikipedia!) that I had to be on the ground floor. “Teen Titans” at first and then so much more with the “New 52”!
Ah, the New 52…it was both exciting and actually hell. Just like the end of middle school and the start of high school. I don’t want to subscribe to the cliche of being a nerd in high school but I certainly felt that way at the time and being everyone’s “Black Friend” at a conservative private school didn’t help. Comics podcasts were a fun little treat though and made me feel like I was chatting to friends about the characters I loved when I was too scared to do so at my local comics shop. I even had one of my own from my freshman year of high school. It’s unlistenable
As I got towards the middle of high school, comics got…good with Matt Fraction’s “Hawkeye,” and Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s “The Wicked and The Divine.” I got more involved with my school’s thespian troupe (Not to flex, but I was president two years running) and we had a big trip to New York. I was next to my director on the plane and mentioned offhandedly hearing about Midtown comics and she squeezed in a visit while we were there. It was wild to me how much the rest of our group were into being there and I even gave recommendations. I felt cool and it was because of comics which was, in a word…weird. Comics as “cool” was a big defining trait of highschool as I would see how tight the comics community was with ComicsAlliance (rip), Kate Leth’s Less Than Live (also rip) and Twitter (Oh God Twitter). The idea that all of these people who made these great comics all vaguely knew each other was so exciting and something I desperately wanted to be apart of, which was maybe just why I saw myself in Laura’s character in “The Wicked the Divine”. I so wanted to be the ascended comics fanboy. Was this a healthy goal? Not really. Is it a side effect of growing up on the internet? Yes definitely!
My quest for this mythical comics community had many fronts and tools. Reddit or Tumblr? Fanart or writing? Did any of this matter? I left for college and it was…hard. On top of classes and friendships, I don’t think I could afford to put so much thought into the ever-elusive comics community. I still exercised my love for the medium by making comics myself for The Comic Jam and a couple of anthologies. I also managed to turn my urge to write papers for classes on comics into dipping my toe into becoming a professional comics journalist .
Which brings me to this year, which is unquestionably the most important one of this decade for my relationship with comics. I wrote a piece on race at DC Comics Bulletin, A Deep Dive into the BatCat Wedding playlist on my own blog (rip) and eventually mozy on down to this website, where I have written way more than I could have thought I would when I first applied which I’m grateful for. On this site alone I’ve covered a whole season of TV, reviewed an X-Men relaunch, and put on of my most important books of the decade to bed. This doesn’t mention my X-Force recaps on XavierFiles, and my fan art being something people want commissioned. This year has been the one where I have finally have a place in this comics community and have a voice that people seem interested in hearing and I am so grateful for Multiversity and everyone who has been willing to listen.
As the decade ends, I am in a radically different position in relation to comics and as a person. I’m graduating in June and the roaring ’20s will be the first decade I fully experience as an adult and that is absolutely terrifying and exciting. If 11-year-old Kenneth could see that he could Google “Kenneth Laster comics” and have actual content come up, he’d be pretty impressed. Let’s see if 31-year-old Kenneth *existential scream* is just as impressive. See you in the new decade!
