"Chicks dig comics"

I quite enjoyed reading Hugo nominee “Chicks Dig Comics”, where women from diverse backgrounds talk about their discovery of comics, some of them in an era where a girl showing an interest in the medium would have been considered bizarre. I mentionned this to Sue, my wife, who had similar experiences and as a result stayed away from comics from much of her life although she remembers the time the Submariner flew off, prompting Johnny Storm to exclaim that Namor’s little anklewings sure did their thing. The book also contains interviews with people such as Terry Moore, who created “Strangers in paradise”. There are omissions in the whole affair though. Some time ago, I read an interview with the man who’d created “Amethyst”, in which he said that, even years later, women would tell him how much the story had mattered to them. Oh, and what about Christy Marx, who created “Sisterhood of Steel”(*) and who currently writes for DC?

(*) My thanks to Susan de Guardiola for her gift of the whole series to me.

being a marvel

I guess I've always been a Marvel person. Sure, the first superhero I discovered was DC's Superman, who has a special place in my heart as the Ultimate Good Guy - or the Ultimate Big Bore, compared to Batman, who's cool, yes, but who would you prefer to meet? But I digress. Or maybe not that much. Whenever I ask myself who my favorite superheroes are, there is always Superman. When I came across the Fantastic Four though, I discovered a group that was an actual family with its weaknesses and its strengths, one that didn't give a hoot about Secret Identities, and... One of them was a monster. On the outside. On the inside he was the most human person, very protective of friends and family. That's why I'm still a Marvel person even though I read few comics now, and why Ben Grimm is one of my favorite comic-book characters, followed - for similar reasons - by blue-furred Hank McCoy.