It's Free Comic Book Day!
I talk about my love of comics, and share details on some panel talks i'm doing today!
Today is Free Comic Book Day! Comic book shops across the country are taking part, offering up a select range of comics for free, as well as some bonus events, a really fun day for kids (and very nerdy adults such as myself)! In Auckland you have Heroes for Sale, In Hamilton Mark One Comics, Christchurch has Popweasel, and here in Wellington, there is Graphic Comics.
I’ll also be taking part in a couple of panel talks with other New Zealand comic creators at the National Library as part of ComicFest today! The first panel is at 11:30 and is called, ‘Expanding Horizons’ which is all about finding new ways to tell stories using comic techniques. The second, at 2:30 PM, ‘Sharing Te Ao Māori and Mātauranga Māori through Pukawaituhi’ is about how Māori artists are innovating the comics medium with visual languages grounded in mātauranga, pūrākau, and tikanga Māori.
If you aren’t based in Wellington or are COVID-conscious, both talks will also be live-streamed!
I love Comics.
I feel like that’s pretty obvious, but I’ve never really spoken on exactly how far-reaching this love is, and how it began. I have collected over (an estimated) 3000 comics since I first discovered them when I was 10, It has been a rather expensive love affair, but one that got me here today.
My cousin introduced me to comics when he handed down to me a stack of old 90’s Marvel Comics, and I must have read each one front-to-back a thousand times. I was already a fan of the X-Men and Teen Titans cartoons, but I had no idea they were based on comics, which had been around for decades and had their own rich histories and complicated continuities - I was hooked.
I collected any comic I could, which was hard as American comics weren’t sold in magazine stores, only in specialty comic shops. So I would traverse through second-hand book shops and op shops, take my regional library card to all the different libraries, read any comics they had on offer, and read any book/wiki on comics history I could find.
And I loved the characters, First was the X-Men character Gambit, I would wear a trenchcoat, carry around a staff ( a stick I found) and a pack of playing cards just like him to primary school (wearing a trenchcoat to school in the early 2000s was a choice). I waited oh-so-patiently for my mutant powers to come through, but alas, I was just throwing playing cards that didn’t explode on impact at other kids for no good reason.
Then I had a brainwave: I could draw my own comics, and create my own universes, and so my love of creating comics began. I would incorporate friends, classmates, and teachers into them and began sharing the various ‘in-universe’ titles across school - I had a very small but dedicated audience, take my word for it.
And that became my dream job: writing and drawing comics, now I’ve kind of achieved that dream although political comics probably wasn’t the path I intended at age 12 (although I did make fun of the mean teachers in these comics, so maybe they were political from the start).
Comics kickstarted a love of reading, learning new words, letting me explore a very active imagination, and was the catalyst for learning how to draw. It’s wonderful to see more schools and libraries embracing comics and graphic novels, and seeing them become popular with children - Dav Pilkey’s ‘Dog Man’ has been the best-selling comic book for the last few years, outselling Batman, Spiderman, etc (Dav Pilkey also created Captain Underpants, for those who are uncultured).
I’m such a supporter of getting kids hooked on comics, and Free Comic Book Day is such a great way to get them their first hit, It is also a love that can be shared with parents, (mine always patiently read what I created or would listen to me explain the 50-year continuity of the X-Men). But most crucially it’s just a fun thing to dive into if you have an overactive imagination and could lead to so many different loves and passions, heck they may end up making political cartoons for Substack, and isn’t that every parent’s dream?
Danz