How I Became a Comic Book Girl

As a child I was always interested in Science Fiction. I guess this isn't too surprising because that was also when the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, came out. Star Wars was always my first love. My love for Science Fiction expanded into the superhero genre after watching cartoons of Spider-man and the Wonder Woman TV series starring Lynda Carter. Wonder Woman and Princess Leia were incredible role models. I knew right away that I wanted to be just like them.

It was when I was around 7 that I first came across comic books. Marvel Comics was publishing a Star Wars comic and I was so excited to read more about the adventures of Princess Leia and her crew (that's how I thought of it, anyway!). The artwork of the comic was amazing to me. The characters looked so much like their on screen personas that it was easy to find myself drifting into that galaxy. Unfortunately for me, that was pretty much just a few issues because I didn't live in the United States at the time and comics were pretty hard to come by.

I was older, probably around 10, when my passion for comic books formed. I remember it very clearly. Even though I wasn't into comic books, I still loved superheroes in their cartoon form. My favorite of all time was Spider-man and His Amazing Friends. Firestar was the coolest superhero that I had ever seen. She had all these really neat powers and could fly, to boot. Not thinking that this could get any better, I watched the episode that guest starred the X-Men. Now I was completely and utterly hooked! The thought that you could be born with super powers and not even know it was incredible! Oh, how I wished that I were a mutant. And then there was Cyclops. My second love after Han Solo (my poor husband had a lot to live up to!). In the cartoon, he was just so confident and took care of the situation. I had to find out more about the X-Men.

In a book store in Thailand or Indonesia is where I stumbled upon my first X-Men comic book. After that, I wanted to read every comic book about them that I could find. Reading about other superheroes in those books lead me to other comics until I was a true comic book lover and collector. Now I have so huge of a collection that I have actually switched to digital comics. I just didn't have to space to store all those comics anymore. I'm keeping my print collection, though, to pass of to my children when they are older.

Now that I have two daughters, I am even more sensitive to how girls who like nontraditional things are treated and perceived. I want to do anything that I can to help increase the awareness of girls who love comics and who are in the industry. We have definitely come a long way from when I was a child but we still have quite a way to go. We need to come together as a group and show that there are a lot of us girls that love comics. Hopefully that will bring even more women into comics to the point where it is not unusual at all for a girl to have a comic book in her hand.