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On alternating Fridays, Leah Schnelbach waxes rhapsodic about comics, education, religion, and postmodernity. David Foster Wallace would be proud.

Okay, so it’s been a busy week, so this is going to be a short one – the obligatory comics geek origin story. (I’m fine with the term “geek”, btw, my friends and I wore the term as a badge of honor just slightly before it was cool – and anything was better than “nerd” – so I’m kind of attached to it.)

I’m 15. My best girlfriend keeps talking about this writer she’s heard of, Neil Diamond or something.

I’m like, “Neil Diamond writes comics?”

“NO, no,” she says, “Guy-man.” [Yes, I’m well aware it’s pronounced “Gaym’n.”]

This is way back in the dark ages before Barnes & Noble stocked comics… actually, come to think of it, this was before Barnes & Noble was even in our town. We were still making do with a Waldenbooks. So she kept trying to order The Sandman, but for whatever reason it never actually comes. Eventually she finds Good Omens, we read it, and it immediately becomes our shared favorite book. I’m guessing the updated copies have a different bio now, but back then the little “About the Author” blurb made some snarky joke about Neil thinking that writing comics is a perfectly acceptable career for a grownup, or something similar. I’m thinking, well, why not? What’s wrong with comics? I blush now over my naïveté…

So we finally find The Doll’s House at this ridiculous kiosk-store at the mall, like a Sunglass Hut but for comics. It was round, and the poor comic guy was stuck in the center, with fanboys trying to pilfer copies in every direction. Like a 5th Century Irish monk having to watch the Vikings sack the villages below him…. So one little segment of this comics roundhouse was devoted to Vertigo, and there, hiding behind a Preacher comic, we found the second Sandman graphic novel. We all took turns reading it, and then began making pilgrimages to the kiosk to get more. None of us had ever read anything like it… completely apart from how great the story was, and how cool the constantly changing art was, this Gaiman guy was just so goddamned smart. As I mentioned above, my friends and I were all pimply, four-eyed nerds long before we were geeks with dyed hair and silver jewelry – which is to say we knew our shit – and he was still coming up with mythologies none of us had ever encountered before. It actually became a kind of game, to try to find obscure facts before they popped up in Sandman – the friend breathlessly telling me about Emperor Norton was pointed to Fables and Reflections. The day one of us found the definition of “l’esprit d’escalier” another was reading the same definition in Death: The High Cost of Living….it got a little weird. And obsessive.

But I think the most interesting part of the whole thing was this:

I noticed that the editor was Karen Berger.

I noticed that Gaiman dedicated the book to his daughter.

I noticed that the head of DC was Jenette Kahn.

The main characters are a young independent woman and her gay male friend.

The two heroes of the book are a skinny pale goth and a fat, exceedingly proper incarnation of G.K. Chesterton, the 19th C. British fantasy writer.

So… the comics world that I inhabited was always feminist, queer-friendly, welcoming of heroes of all shapes, sizes, and levels of depression, highly literate and referential, and writers and artists could create works that deserved to be taken seriously by anyone who cared about good storytelling.

Which is why (covers mouth with hand and mumbles) years later, I’m still stunned when people don’t understand the comics are a real art form, as valid as all the others.

Leah Schnelbach is the Interim Director of the New York Center for Independent Publishing and Director of Publications for the Sequential Art Collective. In what passes for her free time these days, she chips away at her first novel and daydreams about hitting the flea market with Andy Warhol.

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