Our summer of ♥ continues, as Jason Rodriguez tells us why he ♥’s Page 22. Jason’s the editor of several comic projects, like the upcoming Postcards (due in stores July 24), Elk’s Run, Kill All Monsters and Western Tales of Terror. More info on his work and upcoming appearances can be found on the Eximious Press blog.

Take it away, Jason …

Page 22 [peyj twuhn-tee-too] n. – The last page in a serialized comic book; not necessarily the 22nd page. The name comes from the standard comic format of 22 pages of content and 10 pages of ads.

There used to be this Mom & Pop store called Louie’s on Henry Street between Carroll and President in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. As kids, we’d stop there everyday after school because Louie’s had everything a kid liked more than homework: DJ Boy and Operation Wolf, boxes upon boxes of Joyva Jelly Rings, quarter waters, and comic books. I’d spend a small portion of my allowance on chocolate and sugar water and arcade games; the rest would go to a comic book that caught my attention. G.I. Joe, Transformers, and the occasional Spider-Man – even some of the more embarrassing comics like Mad Balls, Popples, and the Get-along Gang occasionally made their way home with me. I never had a desire to collect consecutive books. I never felt like I had to pick up the next Batman comic. I spent many years of my childhood perfectly satisfied with purchasing a comic book, reading it, enjoying it, and then deciding what book I was going to pick up next.

Until Page 22 knocked me upside my head.

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by Mark Engblom

So…is that old saying “opposites attract” really true?

If we’re talking romance? Probably not.

If we’re talking about me and “Opposite Number” supervillains?

Absolutely!

Rest assured, I love all the obvious A-List Bad Guys like the Joker, the Green Goblin, the Doctors Doom and Octopus, and all the rest. However, there’s something about those Evil Duplicates, Dark Reflections, and Twisted Doppelgangers I just can’t get enough of.

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This summer we’ve resurrected one of our favorite features, I ♥ Comics, and each Wednesday through Labor Day comics bloggers and creators will discuss the things they love about the medium.

This week, our guest contributor is Bully, the comics-loving bull behind the blog Comics Oughta Be Fun.

Oh, not ♥-♥ her in a romantic way (although I wouldn’t say no to a Gwen-kiss on my fuzzy little stuffed nose), but just plain love her as a character, an amorous interest, and yes, the turning point around which Spider-Man’s world revolves. Sure, I like Mary Jane. The Black Cat was a fun whirl. But nobody, nobody seems to define “comic book girlfriend” with quite the energy and vivaciousness as Miss Gwendolyn Stacy. M.J. gets bonus points for her five-star jackpot-hitting first appearance, but it was Gwen who did most of the heavy lifting during her relationship with Peter to turn him into the considerate and loving soul he’s become. (more…)

To mark the one-year anniversary of Blog@Newsarama, we’re resurrecting one of our favorite features from the past year, “I ♥ Comics.” To help us celebrate, each Wednesday comics bloggers and creators will discuss the things they love about the medium.

This week, our guest contributor is Brigid Alversion, who maintains the indispensable MangaBlog and writes for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.

By Brigid Alverson

I know this is not what people expect to hear from a dedicated manga blogger, but my favorite comics of all time are not manga at all but the British girls’ comics of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which bore girls’ names: Bunty, Judy, Mandy, Diana.

Printed on cheap paper, with color covers and mostly black-and-white interiors, these comics were filled with gripping, episodic tales of boarding-school hijinks, hard-working orphans, and clever girls who had their own businesses walking dogs, modeling, or solving miscellaneous problems.

My aunts used to send them to me from Ireland, in big rolls tied up with brown paper and string. Each weekly issue contained two- or three-page episodes of five or six serials, plus a few single-page stand-alone comics. My sisters and I would sit down and binge on the whole roll, reading them all at once, and then wonder about the stories left unfinished.

Every Christmas we would get a big box of annuals, brightly colored hardbacks with more stories, these ones satisfyingly complete.

There was nothing like them in the U.S., and even as a child, I wondered why. I enjoyed my superhero comics, but the older I got, the less relevant they seemed to my life. Superman, Justice League of America, Thor, and Conan were entertaining but entirely outside my realm of experience. The girls in Bunty and Judy, on the other hand, were characters I could identify with: They were misunderstood by others, they struggled to be true to themselves, they got themselves into trouble and came up with ingenious solutions.

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I dig the superheroes. Yeah, I love other stuff as well, but superheroes are what got me interested in comics and I still have a fondness for them. I honestly don’t get the hatred that flows back and forth between superhero fans and the alternative/indie crowd, even though I understand that everyone likes what they like and are unlikely to be talked into liking something that they don’t. I’m just not sure why we can’t leave each other alone to enjoy our respective, cool comics. 

One thing that superhero fans and the alt/indie folks agree on though is that superhero comics are too often stuck in their own continuity, presenting an unfriendly façade to anyone curious about them. We worry about accessibility and look for jump-on points where new readers can easily pick up an ongoing series without having to figure out what’s going on. We complain about convoluted histories and interconnected titles. And I understand those complaints, because I’ve made them myself. But if I look deeper for a minute, I’m not really as personally bothered by it as I think I am. 

What bothers me is the notion that some hypothetical, potential comics fan is going to pick up the latest issue of 52 or Fantastic Four and isn’t going to know what the hell’s going on. And in my imagination, that potential fan is going to shrug her (or his) shoulders and walk away from the medium. Not only has she rejected something that I love, which does horrible things to my self-esteem; she’s also added another water-drop to the ocean of People Who Don’t Read Comics. So, continuity-heavy superhero comics make me feel like a hopeless nerd at the same time that they’re giving me an ulcer over the Fate of the Industry That I Love So Much. Who wouldn’t hate them? 

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While flipping through the most recent Previews; looking for some good, new stuff to try out, I ran across an entry from Basement Comics for a book called Island of the Tiki Goddess. I gotta tell you: that’s a pretty irresistible title for me. If there’s anything better than an island adventure story, it’s an island adventure story with some weird and spooky tiki in it. The Brady Bunch was never better than when they went to Hawaii and found that cursed tiki idol. Running into Vincent Price and Don Ho was just icing on that cake.

Unfortunately, the solicitation copy for Island of the Tiki Goddess reveals that it’s more of an anthology of general “South Seas” adventure stories than it is a book about a specific island with a specific tiki goddess, so I’m less likely to pre-order the sucker without having tried other things by its creator. But my curiosity is still up. I love that title.

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After visiting San Diego for the first time back in 1997, I immediately called my older brother, who had spent the previous week driving up and down the California coastline.

“California is awesome. How come mom and dad never took us to Southern California when we were kids?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But they owe us big.”

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Several years ago, in his draft of the script for a proposed Six Million Dollar Man movie, Kevin Smith made sure to incorporate into dialogue every phrase of the familiar opening narration: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him … better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster….”

Today that script might be languishing unproduced in a dusty corner of the Internet, but it understood the value of the mission statement.

More than a catchphrase, the mission statement can be expressed as exposition (Space … the final frontier), marketing (Faster than a speeding bullet!), or a mantra (With great power comes great responsibility). It quickens the pulses of those in the know, preparing them for the action sure to follow.

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Everyone thinks it: What if? What if I didn’t make the same decisions? How would my life have changed? What would happen if I had actually gone up and talked to that girl/guy? Would I be happy now if I did something differently? Would my life be worse?

It’s so common that there are whole sections in bookstores on alternate histories, and the majority of sci-fi stories are based on trying to decide that same question. Although there are so many varied alternate histories and scenarios, we keep getting sucked in again and again because there’s something magical about those stories. We’re all interested in how things could have turned out, and comic fans are no exception.

Having a story become “imaginary” or out of continuity sets the character free. These stories are allowed to “break the rules that kept their characters in the limbo known as the status quo. Superman doesn’t have to be good; he can now be a villain. Hell, Luke Cage can now be a woman. The character doesn’t even have to be human any longer if the writer doesn’t want him to be. The stories can be about anything. They can change something fundamental in the character and it doesn’t change who the original character is because it “doesn’t really count.” Ben Parker could still be alive, Peter could become a greedy celebrity who couldn’t care less about his family, let alone saving the world, and we would still want to read about it.

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Each Wednesday, one of the Blog@Newsarama contributors discusses the things we love about comics in a feature we like to call, “I ♥ Comics”!

Whenever someone asks me what my first comic was, I have no idea, I’ve been reading them since I could remember. I know for sure it was the late seventies, I wasn’t even in school yet, and was partial to the female characters. Of course, I loved Wonder Woman, and I used to dress up like her, with my little Wonder Woman bathing suit, a home made tiara, and my little red booties. Then at some point, I started to get DCs Adventure Digest and the star spangled panties weren’t cool anymore. I wanted to wear all black! I wanted a black swimsuit, a black jacket, black buccaneer boots, and fishnet stockings. I don’t know why, but Alex Toth’s Black Canary absolutely captured me.

I wonder how many mothers hear those immortal words “mom, I want fishnet stockings.” Especially at a time when fishnets were associated to street walkers, not super-heroes. My mom would tell me those were adult clothes. Now, my mom is fairly cool, and reads comics herself, and has every issue of Mad Magazine to date so maybe that’s why it wasn’t a big deal to her that I was asking for such things. I have no idea if she thought I was serious or not, or if she would have let me, but it didn’t matter. Good luck being a child under five years old wanting black clothes. The availability of an item like that was next to none. The closest I could find to black in my size was brown or navy blue corduroy pants.

I believe it was in Blue Ribbon Digest that I discovered another fishnet clad heroine. Top hat, tails, fishnets! Oh my gosh, she was soooo cool! I told my mom I wanted to wear that to an upcoming wedding. I ended up settling with a mesh hat, a Barbie pink dress, and white panty hose with a frilly lacy bum. Okay, so it wasn’t quite the same…

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In 1978, at the age of nine, my older brother came up with what was probably the single greatest idea in the history of all nine-year-olds: “I’m going to start an Avengers club.”

Being his younger brother, I instantly let him know how brilliant and groundbreaking I thought this idea was: “Okay.”

And thus, the Avengers of Wildgrove Drive, Garland, Texas, were born.

Y’see, since birth, my brother and I were comic book fans. We each had our favorite titles (he had Avengers and Fantastic Four, I had the X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man). We bought whatever merchandise we could find featuring those heroes. Lacking any comic book action figures in a post-Mego, pre-Secret Wars society, we pretended our Star Wars figures were super heroes … quickly discovering that comics were a lot less sexist than the Star Wars movies, as our one Princess Leia figure only went so far.

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Each Wednesday, one of the Blog@Newsarama contributors discusses the things we love about comics in a feature we like to call, “I ♥ Comics”!

I love monsters. And it has nothing to do with liking to be scared (though I do).

I wasn’t a hideous kid or anything. I don’t want to come across like I had a miserable childhood, because I had a family who loved me and usually one good friend at any given time. But I was a shy kid and I didn’t connect easily with other people. I was never good at sports and didn’t particularly care to be outside. I’d much rather have been in front of the TV or hidden in my room with a book or a few comics.

I probably wasn’t that different from a lot of kids who grew up to be comics fans.

The books and comics I read at first were all about heroes. Larger-than-life folks whom I could dream about being like. I started with Richie Rich (man, to have the toys he did) and kept going through Tom Swift, Batman, Tarzan, Thor, and James Bond. It was a nice escape. Imagining I was those guys, I could feel cool, powerful, rich, and popular.

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Each Wednesday, one of the Blog@Newsarama contributors discusses the things we love about comics in a feature we like to call, “I ♥ Comics”!

As the younger brother, I learned early on that I was destined to play second fiddle in games of “Let’s Pretend.”

When my brother received a bow for his birthday, we marched, plastic funnels atop our heads, into a small patch of woods to play Robin Hood. I was Little John.

After we saw 20-year-old reruns of Davy Crockett on The Wonderful World of Disney, we donned matching faux-coonskin caps, but my brother was the King of the Wild Frontier. I had to be Daniel Boone who, in our alternate history, shared many adventures with Crockett. (C’mon, they had the same fashion sense. Plus, I was like 4 years old.) But if a cousin were visiting, I was demoted to George Russel.

And when our parents bought us Mego World’s Greatest Super-Heroes dolls action figures, my brother laid claim to Batman, while I was left with Robin, whose oversized gloves refused to stay on.

I was the ampersand, always on the far side of “Robin Hood and –” or “Batman and –.” I was the tagalong. The sidekick.

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