Author: Martha Thomases

It’s Thanksgiving week. Impossible to get anyone on the phone. News stories about crowded, delayed and cranky airports. Christmas music reaches overload levels.

Let’s talk about giving thanks, and what inspires it. Here are some of the things for which I’m grateful this year:

• It’s a great time to be a comics reader. Even during the birth of the direct market when there were all kinds of cool independents, I don’t think we had the variety we have now. A lot of this is due to the Interwebs, the series of tubes that provides a low cost of entry for new readers and creators. A lot of this is due to the success of graphic novels in bookstores, which opens the medium to new readers who might want more than superheroes (obviously, what they want is manga). There’s comics for kids, comics for historians, comics for soap opera fans – really, the list goes on and on. Dirk Deppey, at ¡Journalista!, separates “literary” and “pop” comics, a dichotomy with which I disagree, but not in a hostile way, more of a “let’s have a few drinks and argue all night at the bar” kind of way.

• It’s great to be back in the comics business after doing other things for nearly a decade. I’ve gone to a lot of conventions this year, and seen people I hadn’t seen for a long time. Here, in no particular order, are a few that I missed while I was gone: Marc Hempel, Mark Wheatley, Ted McKeever, Scott Hampton, David Glanzer, Richard Case, Bo Hampton, Denys Cowan, Dick Giordano, Eric Shanower, Axel Alonso, Dean Haspiel and Nick Bertozzi, Mark Millar, Joel Meadows, Stuart Moore, Maggie Thompson, Joe Illidge, Mimi Cruz, Michael Eury and a bunch more I can’t remember at the moment. And, of course, my pals here on ComicMix, like Mike Gold, John Ostrander, Glenn Hauman, Michael Davis, Brian Alvey, Denny O’Neil, Mike Raub, Kai Connelly and Elayne Riggs. (more…)

In honor of Halloween, here are some things that have scared me during my lifetime.

• Dell Comics. When I was ten years old, my friend Kenny Raffle had a big pile of comics he let me read. In the stack was a Dell horror comic about a giant hand that would come out from under the street through manhole covers, grab people, and devour them through holes in its palm. It was stupid but terrifying. Several years later we had squirrels in the walls of our house, and when they ran around in the middle of the night, it sounded like fingernails on the wall. I’ve since learned that Dell didn’t submit their material to the Comics Code, arguing they were inherently wholesome. I mention this not to defend the Code, but to demonstrate that what seems wholesome to one person can terrify another. Stephen King was afraid of the “twi-night double-header.”

• High School. I know now that it’s almost impossible to be an interesting adult if you had a good time in high school, but it still haunts me. I dream about finding myself still there, despite my insistence that I’m an adult, I graduated college, and I can’t live in an all-girls dorm anymore. Also, I can no longer fit in my uniforms.

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