Nerd Stories

A friend asked me yesterday if I were enjoying the new Daredevil series on Netflix.  I had only seen the first seven episodes, but I was liking it a lot.

It shouldn't surprise you, but I am a comic book nerd.  What hadn't occurred to me until yesterday was that other people might not have grown up with comic books the way I did.  I see every damn comic movie & I watch every damn comic television show because that mythology has grown inside me as I have grown.  An example: I am probably the only non-teenage-girl who watched all ten seasons of Smallville.

It doesn't mean I like everything out there - nerds have standards! - but I like more movies & shows than my friend does, & something made me ask him when he started reading comics.  When he said he was in his teens at the time, it somehow explained his significant lack of interest compared to mine.  I'll bet if you asked me at five years old what Daredevil's secret identity was, I would've said, confidently, "Matt Murdock."

Comics were around the house all through my childhood.  My older brothers worked at the same convenience store, called Orchard Hills Grocery, as my mother, & they brought comics home.  (I'm almost certain they didn't pay for them.)  Orchard Hills Grocery, by the way, still exists in Garland, Texas, & today it looks like this:

I don't think there were poles to stop cars in the front, nor bars on the windows, when I was a kid, but otherwise it's the same damn building.  My mother worked there in the mornings, & the elementary school I went to was a block or two behind the store, so we often stopped there to say hello to her (& get candy for lunch) during my fourth & fifth grade years.

Anyway.  Lots of comics all the time.  I read them constantly, but I think, by the time I was in seventh grade, I had started to outgrow them.  I had come to like science fiction (like Star Wars) (although not the Star Wars comic book) & movies better, & certainly had begun to read classic literature like Dickens & Jack London.  Comics didn't seem childish or anything to me, I just felt like they weren't as interesting as when I was younger.

(I can't say for sure.  I was twelve years old.  Who reflects on their life like that when they're twelve?)

Then something happened.  My littler brother had a classmate named Gus who, out of the blue, contacted me because he knew I had a lot of comic books.  He asked me if I knew who John Byrne was.  (Who is John Byrne, you may ask?  He was an artist who came into his own on The X-Men comic, making it the most popular comic at the time, in the early 1980s.  Here's his Wikipedia page.)

I had no idea who John Byrne was, which probably bothered me.  I could identify Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, John Romita, Curt Swan - pretty much any artist from before 1980.  Who was this upstart?  & why was he making a kid who not only was younger than I was but who was also a sporty type (Gus played football) talk to me about comics?

It turns out that John Byrne's X-Men comics were in such high demand that back issues started to be "worth something."  The same thing happened later with baseball cards.  Gus's interest wasn't in the content, but I - I was a reader.  I recognized that something different was happening in comics.  & I was sucked back in.

While I don't think I would have abandoned comics entirely, I am glad I got back into them in the early 80s, because I probably would've been in the middle of high school & hearing about a comic book called The Watchman & paying lots of money I didn't have to find copies.  (Collecting them in graphic novels was not a thing yet.)  One of the things I was fortunate to discover is Frank Miller's Daredevil.

Frank Miller has become something of a polarizing figure these days.  He is criticized for his somewhat anachronistic tough-guy protagonists in stuff like Sin City.  I confess to not liking or following a lot of his later stuff, but I did like his Daredevil & his Dark Night Returns.  Again, I might have not come to them at the time if a kid who knew my little brother hadn't daydreamed about getting extra cash by buying & selling funny books.

My re-entry into that world was pretty quick.  I had discovered a book store on Shiloh road that sold used comics pretty cheap & was about to start selling the new "direct market" releases.  But I didn't ignore the classic newsstand comics.  Around this time, my mother worked at a convenience store down the street from Orchard Hills - this one was called the Time Saver - & one day she let me take off the rack (when the boss wasn't there, my mother assumed that things were free) an issue of Daredevil - I think it was this one:

This is from 1981, so I was 13.  I grabbed it, I took it home, & I read it - & what Chris Claremont & John Byrne's X-Men suggested was confirmed by Frank Miller: something new was happening in comics.  I rode my bike around town to find small, independently owned convenience stores, to see if earlier issues were still available.  (They left comics on the rack far longer than stores like 7-11.)  I was able, with the help of the comic shop, to get all of Miller's entire run that way.

(The Time Saver is not there any longer; a different convenience store was built over its ashes.  The used bookstore that also had comics closed some time in the 1990s, after I had left Garland for Austin.  According to Google Maps, what's there now is a medical supply place.)

Frank Miller's run on Daredevil highly influenced the Netflix series.  Characters he created are prominent, as is Daredevil's adversarial relationship with the Kingpin.  Much of this is why the show thrills me so.  My wife, who did not grown up with comics like I have, is not in the slightest interested in the show.

Which brings me back to my discussion with a pal about the series & comic book movies/shows in general: one reason I do things like watch ten years of Smallville is because my attachment to these creations is deep.  In a real sense, they were friends of mine when I was young.  When I rediscovered comics in my teen years, I became an object of ridicule to my peers.  I would wear a Walt Simonson Thor t-shirt in gym class, & to the others in the class that was grounds to mock me.  But I was fine with the things that I loved.

When I watch a show like Daredevil, I'm doing it to be with an old friend.  When it turns out to be as good as it is, I'm as thrilled as when someone I love has done something wonderful with his or her life.

When it isn't all that good, well: I'm still pretty supportive.  Because we're very old friends.