I’ve been collecting and reading comic books as long as I can remember — and I can remember back for most of my 73 years. It was not something I ever hid the way you might hide a shameful bad habit or something that made people question your I.Q.
Every so often over the years, some fellow reader/collector has asked about if I’ve ever been mocked or criticized for love of that reading material and they’re amazed when I tell them the answer is “Almost never.” And you could lose the “almost” if I’d never ventured near local science-fiction fandom of the late-sixties and early-seventies.
I was also a reader of science-fiction…some of it, anyway. I favored the kind that was anchored on the planet on which I resided in time periods not too far into the past or future. Before we had comic book conventions in Southern California and for a few years after the first on in 1970, I sometimes mingled with the local s-f crowd and attended a few such conventions but I didn’t fit in with that crowd. The cons all seemed to be there largely for the consumption of alcohol with one’s friends. I didn’t have many friends at these gatherings and I didn’t and still don’t imbibe — ergo, the not fitting-in.
I never faulted anyone for what they read or drank but at these particular s-f events, the air was often thick with condescension towards those who read comic books. You’d think people who themselves were mocked or called “nerds” for their tastes in fiction would be more tolerant of someone else’s…but no, not there and then.
One older female fan used to lecture me that Comic Book Fandom was an unfortunate outgrowth of Science-Fiction Fandom and oughta stay that way…or better still, disappear entirely. What they read was for sophisticated adults and what “we” read (drawing a firm, uncrossable line with that “we” there) was for the kiddos. Her suggestion was that there was something wrong with us for not outgrowing it.
The last such lecture I got — this would have been around ’73 — was from a guy wearing Spock ears and brandishing a plastic phaser that fired little multi-colored discs. One of these…
Understand please that I’m talking about certain s-f fans I encountered; not all and certainly not any these days. I haven’t been to any pure s-f conventions for close to a half-a-century. At the kind of cons I attend, everyone’s interests seem pretty welcome and it’s often hard to tell where one category leaves off and another begins. At WonderCon this year, I was showing my friend Gabriella around and explaining to her that a gathering like that is a convergence or loosely-associated interests: Fantasy on TV or movie screens, videogames, comic books, animation, anime, cosplaying, Lego, Funko Pop, model kits, toys, artwork, prose novels, collectible items, newspaper strips…and on and on.
And the worst thing that anyone has to say about someone’s interest is “I’m not interested in that.”
I feel very “at home” in such surroundings. I feel I’m among friends even though I might never have met 98% of them. I didn’t feel that way at the early science-fiction conventions I attended. Too many people there were too damned defensive about being faulted for what they liked.
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