Graphic Novelties

In sixth grade, I had a fairly stable crew of friends. About half of them were in the “gifted” program, like I was. I had trekked up to sixth grade reading classes in fifth grade, and now in sixth grade I had my first taste of an “independent study” experience, an hour in the library every day to read on my own. Instead of reading, though, I drew comic book characters.

I was becoming more and more obsessed with comics. They had everything I liked in them. They were action-packed (appealed to the sports fan in me), art-driven (appealed to my budding artistic temperament), literary (whole dense mythologies with symbolic hero quests were created), creative and cartoony. The comic book world was an extreme place, full of basic good vs. evil structures, wildly weird visuals, passions, violence, and perfectly etched human figures doing impossible tasks in bizarre costumes. I’d been taking art classes for years, and now I wanted to draw more than ever.

I was in many ways, looking back on it, a fairly straightforward comic book nerd at that point. I was obsessed with girls and comics. With the former I was socially graceful (I had a lot of friends who were girls, which I attribute to healthy relationships with my mom and sister) and with the latter I could escape any secret inner awkwardness the former made me feel. I was friends with a lot of girls, but not at all the debonair leading man Marc Ronczka was. I was quite the opposite, a late bloomer who watched my elementary school classmates shoot up past me in height long before the process began for me.

Junior high was hellish. Lehman-Jackson merged with Lake Noxen Elementary to form Lake Lehman Junior High. Kids from Harvey’s Lake, a small resort lake northwest of Dallas, were well-off and sophisticated. Kids from Noxen, the amalgam of trailer parks and grunt workers from the lake’s menial labor force, were an altogether different breed – a tobacco-chewing, boot-wearing group that proudly called themselves hicks. Noxen kids were not to be trifled with. And the Lake kids and Noxen kids began, in junior high, to create a weird social strata in our school, with the Lehman-Jackson kids falling squarely in between them. I began to learn about the differences that socioeconomic status can have in the politics of human relationships. The Christian kid from WVCS cried out at the lack of compassion in such behaviors. Most of junior high, for me, was a time to lay low. I spent my study hall time drawing to avoid entering into the conflicts around me.