Broken Frontier

All comic advocates everywhere have a “white whale” of sorts. Like Captain Ahab and his obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, we comic advocates occasionally set impossible goals for ourselves that we keep reaching for to no avail. We try to achieve this goal, to scale this wall, over and over again, hurling ourselves at it repeatedly, painfully, only to meet with failure time and again. For a comic advocate, this task we set for ourselves is not to catch a whale but to convince a person to read a comic, a person who resists our every attempt no matter how hard we try.

For some comic advocates, the “white whale” they’re pursuing might be a parent. Perhaps this comic fan has always heard from his or her mother that reading comics is kids’ stuff, a waste of time and money, and no matter how hard he or she tries, this parent cannot be convinced otherwise. My folks however have always been willing to show at least a passing interest in my hobby. My mom especially has seemed willing to check out the comics I brought her in the past; since she is already a big reader, getting her to crack the spine on the latest graphic novel I bring her has never been a stretch. My dad has proven more difficult since he doesn’t really read that much. But he did read a few comics of mine back in the day; he’s the one who got me started on them anyway, reading issues of the JLA to me as a kid. Usually if I can find something suited to his interests (heavy on the action), he’ll check it out, and a while back, when I gave him a copy of Road to Perdition to check out, he enjoyed it a great deal.

For others, their Moby Dick is a friend who sneers when the subject of comics comes up, a supposed pal who laughs under his breath at every mention of comics. But as with my parents, I never really had this problem. Most of my friends in college had tried comics at one time or another already, so getting them to pick one up on occasion wasn’t hard.

Instead, my hardship was of a completely different sort. Like so many other comic advocates, my own impossible convert was my spouse (whom you might notice I have wisely chosen not to refer to as “my white whale,” just in case she might read this column). She’s been around my comics for years and knew very shortly after we met in college that she would have to accept comics as a part of my life. Our first apartment was attached to a comic shop, for God’s sakes, so she must have learned to accept them begrudgingly at some point. But that’s all it is. She tolerates my interest in comics with a kind of eye-rolling attitude, but she would never ever be interested in them herself.

Over the years I’ve tried to get her to try some stuff, but I have always met with rejection. Once, when I was laughing quite uproariously at a Liberty Meadows strip, I showed it to my wife in the hopes that she too would find it funny. Her only comment when she finished was that Brandy’s boobs were too big and that I was a pervert for reading the book. I almost had her hooked on Strangers in Paradise for a bit due to the beautiful sketches I’d had Terry Moore do for me when I met him in Chicago, but that was before my mom read the book. When my mom and I were talking about the story later, my wife discovered that Katchoo, one of the lead characters, is a lesbian. After that, she kind of tuned out.

My wife actually expressed a desire once all on her own to check out a comic, and I was ecstatic. She wanted to read Paradigm because she met the creators of the book when they came to speak to my class last year and, as she is fond of telling me on occasion in an attempt to make me jealous, she thought artist Jeremy Haun is cute. However, she didn’t get very far into the book before she lost interest. It proved too esoteric for her, I think, and even when I actually appeared as a character in an issue, she simply looked at the page and didn’t flip through the rest of the issue.

Once I went so far as to offer to wash the dishes for a month if she would just read the first trade paperback of Sandman. My wife hates doing dishes, so I thought I had her hooked. And she really did try too; she picked up that book and read about twenty pages into it, trying to force her way through it. But in the end it just didn’t interest her at all, so we went back to splitting dish duty.

I say all of this not because I delight in showing you my failures. Instead, my hope is that these examples illuminate why we sometimes fail as comics advocates. I made several mistakes in my attempts to get my wife to read comics, mistakes that I’ve seen many other advocates make in similar circumstances. I tried to force comics on her really, and I also didn’t take her interests into account. She never reads the funnies, and even when she does, the most they ever draw out of her is a polite laugh. So why would I give her Liberty Meadows? She doesn’t really like fantasy, so Sandman was a poor choice (especially the first collection, in which the story hadn’t hit its stride and its central ideas weren’t quite at the forefront yet). And the attempt at bribery with the dishes just made reading the comics seem like work, which is never a point you want to start out from.

I eventually realized that, if I was going to hook my wife on comics, I would have to have patience and wait for the right opportunity. She would only accept the idea of reading a comic when the time was right for her. I couldn’t force her to accept comics; she would have to come to the point on her own at which she was willing to try them. I would also need to have the perfect book ready for her to try, one that actually spoke to her interests, so that she wouldn’t turn away from them.

I found the perfect book back in August at Wizard World in Chicago. On a whim, I bought a trade paperback of True Story, Swear to God because I’d heard people talking about it on the Bendis boards and it seemed like something I’d be interested in. Of course, I loved the book and instantly thought to myself as I read it, “My wife would really like this.” It’s a brilliant story about the real life relationship between the author and his girlfriend, how they met and fell in love. It’s about something my wife can relate to, and it’s limited in scope enough that she could handle the plot without getting too confused.

Since I bought the book seven months ago, it has been sitting on my shelf, waiting for the proper moment for me to present it to her. Meanwhile, over the course of these months, I would pick up new issues of the comic and say something to her like, “you know, you’d really like this if you gave it a chance.” I just hinted at the idea of her reading it in these instances, being careful not to badger her so I wouldn’t scare her away. I dropped hints about its plot to peak her interest, and then I simply sat back and waited for her to be ready to try it.

My time came just two weeks ago. She has been feeling a bit of guilt lately because of my willingness to support her in her hobbies. My wife hand stamps birthday cards sometimes and then tries to sell them at craft shows. Therefore, when she has made cards in the past, I have helped her come up with ideas, and I have sat at her booth at these craft shows to aid her in making some sales. Also, any time she expresses an interest in some form of entertainment or another, I am usually willing to accept it, whereas she will not do the same for me. I sit down and watch ice-skating and Trading Spaces with her and don’t really mind them too much. However, she does not reciprocate when The Shield comes on or when I watch my Firefly DVDs, choosing instead to leave the room

So it was in a moment of such weakness, when she was feeling a bit bad that I was such a good husband and she didn’t return the favor, that I told her reassuringly, “You’re a great wife; quit feeling down about yourself…” I then paused for a moment and went in for the kill. “But if you really want to show an interest in my hobbies,” I said, “I have a comic you could try. I think you’d like it.”

And that was that. I handed her the collection of the first four issues of True Story Swear to God and sat down to read some comics of my own. Luckily, it happened to be a night when there was nothing on TV that she wanted to watch, so she actually opened it up and started reading. By the end of the book, she had begrudgingly admitted she liked it. At that point she had pretty much hooked herself. The next morning after she left for work and before I had done the same, I got out the next three issues of the book and set them down next to the couch. Without any prompting from me, she read them when she got home from work, and she’s looking forward to the next issue coming soon.

I admit that I was perhaps a bit opportunistic and sneaky, but as the old saying goes, all’s fair in love and war. And since comics advocacy for me is a constant battle, I felt completely justified in all my actions. Since then I tried to get her to read a few other books, and my success has again been rather limited. However, I finally have my foot in the door and I know that all I have to do is be patient. If I wait for the right time and right material to present itself, she will be willing to accept it, and sometimes, with these impossible missions we comic advocates set for ourselves, acceptance is the best success we can hope for.