Broken Frontier

HELLO! Welcome to the beginning of what will hopefully be a long and illustrious career of telling you what I think. I’m going to attempt to be right most of the time, but I make no guarantees.

Let me start out by telling you how I was introduced to Broken Frontier. I met Frederik at the San Diego Comic-con, more specifically at the Hooters up the street from convention center. A. Dave Lewis, creator of Mortal Coils and fellow Broken Frontier regular invited me along for lunch using the excuse that his friend had never been to a Hooters before... yeah, I’ve heard that one before, Dave! [Hey, it really was true… sigh – ed.] The lunch went great and after speaking to Frederik online a few more times, I was more than happy to add my voice to the Broken Frontier website. There is a growing number of women reading and creating comics and it’s more than a pleasure to give them a voice here.

I've been into comics by entire life and I paid for it, BIG TIME! The boys at school thought it was cool that a girl knew more about the X-Men than they did, but it was unacceptable to talk to a "girl" about stuff like that. The girls at school thought I was way off my rocker. Comics were for boys, and more specifically, for geeky boys. So, I was a loser through and through. It was tough. There was literally no one that I could share my love for comic books with. Was it just my silly little town? I doubt it. Since 1997, when I started setting up at comic conventions with my book, Rummblestrips, I've met dozens of women who've told me a similar story. I cannot count the number of times that I've had women of all ages come up to my table with a look of relief on their face and say, "You mean I'm not the only one?" I'm not! Since 97, which is really not that long ago, every year, I see more and more women at all levels of comicbook fandom - reader, collector, fangirl, retailer and creator. I’ve been in all of these things myself. From the beginning to the present, here's my participatory history with comics:

A reader
The first comic I ever bought was Transformers/G.I. Joe #3. Those two cartoons were part of my daily routine. Go to school, come home, watch Transformers at 4:00, then G.I. Joe at 4:30, invite my friend Karen over after dinner and talk for hours about that day’s episodes. So, when I saw this comic book with all my favorite characters on the cover, I was blown away! I was so new to the whole comic book concept that I didn’t know what the #3 meant on the cover. It wasn’t until I discovered "back issues" that I realized I had started reading in the middle of a storyline and I need to go and get issues 1 and 2.

A collector
It’s all Alan Davis’s fault. I saw his cover for Excalibur #4 and immediately fell in love with Nightcrawler. I picked up that issue, picked up the previous Excalbur issues, and then traced Nightcrawler back to the X-Men. I started my X-Men collection with the Classic X-Men, (which included all the fabulous back-stories), continued with regular Uncanny X-Men back issues until I eventually had every X-Men issue from Giant Sized X-Men #1 to the present including all the annuals, specials, graphic novels, etc etc. I was in heaven. I can still remember crying when I read the "Phoenix Saga" and feeling numb when I read the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills.

A fangirl
Years later, I STILL have people running up to me at conventions and yelling "HEY! IT’S SUPERGIRL!!!" Ok, so I dressed up as Supergirl for a few conventions. Now if you look up Supergirl on the net, you’ll find me everywhere... sigh. My favorite memory was posing with Peter David and wrapping my leg around his. He even put the picture in his column one week. I was the "miscellaneous fangirl". Good for me though.

A retailer
I started working at a comic book shop to help get me through college. Little did I know that I would eventually be running the shop and placing all the Diamond orders myself. I could never have comprehended how much work was involved with placing those orders every month. It was a challenge that I came to enjoy and dread all at the same time. When I took over running the store, I remember revamping the whole store so if I was a mother, I would be completely comfortable bringing my little boy OR little girl into the store, partly because it had always annoyed me that the other store in town looked like an unfinished basement.

A creator
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I kept reading the same plot over and over again. Here I was reading comics that were getting more repetitive as each month passed. I mean, Jean Grey died, AGAIN!?!??! I had attended art school for 3 years, I’d been writing since I learned to hold a pen and I my job was selling comics, not making them. It hit me one day when reading over an old story I had written about a 6"5 metallic alien who had finally travelled to earth to settle down: why don’t I create a comic about her?!
So I started thinking, what were the things I liked most about comics? I liked realistic stories, I loved science fiction. Could I create a book that would combine the two? HELL YES! So I did. And that’s when Rummblestrips was born. A slice of life, sci-fi comedy about an Alien named Crash and her human roommate, Rummble.

That’s where I am now. A creator. A comic book Goddess... HA! I’m just a fangirl, I always will be and I say that with much pride. It’s been a long road since my first book.
Little did I know when I was in grade school that I would be able to sit down in a Hooters restaurant and have a fantastic conversation with fellow adults who love comics as much as I do.