THE READER: TRUE CONFESSIONS.
Watching the world through a four-colour filter, with Andrew Wheeler.

Dear reader,

I feel we have known each other long enough now that I can vouchsafe to you a most embarrassing truth. I am, it shames me to admit it, a comics reader. Each week I secretly visit my dealer in Bloomsbury, and hand over small sums of sterling in exchange for more pamphlets to feed my illicit vice. I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me.

But of course, you don't have to. You're a comics reader too. I can tell by the way you shake, and the strange, manic glaze to your eyes.

Actually, those things are incidental. I can tell because you're here. So, as a comics reader, you'll understand what I'm saying; being someone who reads comics is not something you tell people. It's something you admit.

I was out at the pub with some friends the other day, and stuck up a conversation with a guy I'd never met before. A friend of a friend. We didn't have much in common; he was a scuba-diver and motorcycle enthusiast, while I hate swimming, and can't even drive a car. Even so, we found plenty to talk about, and eventually, for reasons I can't recall, the conversation got 'round to comics. Naturally, I told him that I read comics.

"So you're a collector?" he asked.

"No," I replied. "I don't collect comics. I just accrue them. They just seem to build up on every available surface in my apartment".

Reading comics is not a hobby for me. It's just something I do. The rest of the world, unfortunately, doesn't see it that way. No-one ever talks about being a 'book reader'. No-one ever confesses to being a 'music listener', or a 'movie watcher'. These things are commonplace. We 'comics readers', on the other hand, are strange and alien beings.

Perhaps it's time we comics readers were displayed in traveling circuses, between the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy. Perhaps the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy are already comics readers, both of them unable to get a date. Or maybe comics readers should retreat into farmland compounds in the midwest. Perhaps we should set up our own Branch Peter-Davidian sects, and get ready with the shotguns and the cyanide in case the Feds come.

Yes, that's right, we're freaks and outcasts. We are social pariahs. When a comics reader sets up home in a leper colony, the neighbourhood committee politely asks if he wouldn't mind moving on. Self-mutilation fetishists stare at us strangely in the streets, and mothers call their kids in from play when we pass through town. Even Pokemon collectors are beginning to wonder why we always seem to be hanging out in their Pokemon shops.

Reading comics is not a hobby, nor even a way of life or a label. Yet we, the comics readers, are the worst offenders for believing it. Many of us never seem to realize that reading comics is only something we do. It may not be as common as 'movie-watching' or 'music-listening', but it doesn't belong in the ranks of stamp collecting or bird-watching. Sure, a lot of people file and index their comics, but then a lot of people order their CDs, and my father has his own archaic system for organizing his bookshelves. A little order doesn't make anyone a collector, and I for one have not tried to sort out my 3,000-plus comics in more than five years.

We may have collections, but we are not collectors. Not in the true sense of the word. So if we're not collectors, what are we? I should think even 'accruing' counts as some kind of compulsion, especially when you've accrued as many as 3,000. Even I can't deny it's an addiction of sorts. Why else would I still be reading CABLE?

There's also the fact that I spend time online, discussing and writing about these things. There's no denying I have a certain zeal, a twinge of evangelical enthusiasm. Such attitudes have become common among comic readers, who are so often slighted and demeaned. In any other light, this zeal might be called fanaticism. The polite word is fan.

The nearest equivalent might be the screaming tweenie girls at the 'N Sync concerts, holding up signs saying 'JC, I love you'. I said might be. Only the most unbalanced obsessive would weep for joy upon meeting Mark Waid, and if Bill Sienkewicz should ever shake my hand, I can't say that I would never wash it again.

Another good word would be 'enthusiast'. After all, 'fans' are those awful ruffians slavering over WITCHBLADE, and we'd like to think we have a little more discernment than that. Perhaps, in an ideal world, we would be standing around in galleries, drinking Chardonnay and eating little asparagus toasts. We would be applauding Dan Jurgens' latest work for its faux-naïf simplicity and its bold, honest tones. Or perhaps not.

The word we are looking for is not collector, nor fan or fanatic, nor enthusiast, obsessive, outcast or geek. We can be all of these things, to differing degrees, but first and foremost, we are people who read. People who enjoy a good story. People who are lucky enough to have found one more source for solid entertainment than everyone else out there. Your average comics reader could be a Jim Lee fan, a Garth Ennis obsessive, a Kyle Baker collector or a Bryan Hitch enthusiast, but when it comes to the medium at large, there is no one word that can cover all the variables. No one word, that is, except 'reader'.

Admit it. Go on, you weirdo, admit it. Tell the world the awful truth. Let them in on your awful secret.

You read.

Yes, you read.

How can you stand to show your face in public?

Andrew Wheeler, distracted by all the pretty colours, London, February 2000.

Andrew Wheeler is Editor in Chief of PopImage.

Back

Attitude | ProFile | Industrial
Interviews | Reviews | Pi Comics
Talkback | Archives | Gallery