My fifth grade teacher, [...]]]>

Malingerer

Now, I know what you’re thinking: haven proven myself in the realm of computer games, I couldn’t have failed to achieve coolness, right? Reader (may I call you Reader?), I don’t know how it happened, but I did. I failed to achieve. Not just in coolness, but in everything.

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Chun, whom I adored, noted on my report cards, “Jennifer is not living up to her full potential.” I should have been upset about disappointing a teacher who took me to performances of The King and I and 42nd Street, but see part one of this chapter, re: No Caring. I took the B’s that I could earn without really trying and was just fine with them, thank you.

In sixth grade not caring was easy because my teacher was a very ill alcoholic. No adult noticed this until the school year was almost over, despite thirty kids who must have brought home no homework and reports that their teacher always smelled like Ny-Quil™.

The only thing I can recall learning that year — despite the efforts of Mr. Hogan, the enthusiastic young teacher who was brought in to salvage the sixth grade class that was basically descending into Lord of the Flies territory, except that instead of hunting wild pigs in the jungle we had tetherball — was Venn diagrams. Our alcoholic teacher used my friend Yolanda and me as examples to make one to shame us for talking during reading time. The interlocked circles established that Yolanda and I both had long black hair but differed in height, and then Venn diagrams were stored once more in the warehouse of our teacher’s hidden knowledge, never to be seen again.

The result of this school year of freedom was that I missed about two months of school my first year of junior high. (This was before the advent of middle school, which I think is a terrible idea. I was ten when I started 6th grade. Being faced with sharing a campus with the older eighth graders would have cowed me utterly.)

Here’s the problem: the junior high decided that I was “gifted.” As such, I shared no classes with my Lord of the Flies comrades-in-arms and was instead plopped into “Honors” classes with Professional Overachievers.

The P.O.s knew their shit. They took notes on index cards, did their homework, and got their Pre-Algebra tests returned to them without every answer struck out with red ink. I, however, Didn’t Care.

I didn’t care so much that I wouldn’t get out of bed for school for a week. I developed undiagnosable headaches, threatened to run away if I was made to go to school, and went through periods when I wept constantly.

I don’t know, really, what the adults in my life thought was going on. I got a CT scan. A doctor sternly told me that I had to go to school because there was nothing wrong with me. (He called me “young lady” when he said this.) My Bob Ross-like school counselor tried guided relaxation techniques with me. My mom wrote many letters to the school requesting that I be pulled out of Honors classes, attributing my depression to academic over-exertion.

Depression. It’s so obvious now. Today, a kid like I was at twelve would be taken to a child psychiatrist, diagnosed with a legitimate medical condition, and possibly put on medication. Once my brian chemistry was straightened out, maybe I could have gotten a tutor to learn some study skills. But this was 1989. In 1989 I was just a kid who didn’t want to go to school.

I rocked [...]]]>

The Oregon Trail
(or Jennifer Has Died of Cholera)

In fifth grade, my quest to be cool continued on an obvious trajectory: I would make a name for myself by being the best at the educational video games that we could play on the Apple 2E at the back of the classroom.

I rocked Fraction Munchers and this game where you played as a fish and had to decide whether to eat or retreat from other fish, plankton, and the like. How I disdained the boys who didn’t take the fish-eating game seriously! They were always trying to eat fish twice their size or retreating from plankton, the idiots.

The game that showed off my true talents, though, was Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego. In it, you pursued criminals (they were art thieves or something) by following strangely worded clues about geographical locations and suspicious “tow-headed” characters. Sometimes it involved research to figure out what geographical location the clue was referring to, and research is where I shine.

I was great at Carmen San Diego, but every time I got to Senior Inspector level, leading me that much closer to catching the elusive Miss San Diego, one of my classmates would shut off the computer wrong, destroying my game. They did this, even though the instructions on how to properly shut off the computer was taped right there on the computer itself.

What’s wrong with them? I would ask myself. Why can’t they follow simple directions?

Little did I know then that I would be asking these questions all my life.

Another game I loved but wasn’t as good at* was Oregon Trail. This was a game that depended largely on your planning and leadership skills, which, as a youngest child, I lacked.** You had to set out on your journey west having brought the right supplies and you had to make the right decisions about forging rivers and doling out food and medicine. If you didn’t do it right, your entire party would die of dysentery or typhus or cholera — explosive diarrhea, basically.

I lost a lot of people and a lot of oxen. I just couldn’t keep those poor, virtual souls alive, and my Oregon Trail was littered with their graves.

*Usually it is not the case that I love things I am not good at.
**The last time I tried to plan something for me and my siblings to do, they ended up hanging out on the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz all day, and I called my mom in tears because they blew off my dinner reservations. I was 32 years old at the time. As the youngest, I at all times reserve the right to tattle on them.

Next came the [...]]]>

Smart Aleck

I began to form a new version of myself. When I started fourth grade, I began carrying my lunch in a brown paper bag rather than my Peanuts lunchbox.* I stopped wearing dresses, replacing them with a supply of leggings and baggy shirts with abstract, geometric prints.

Next came the attitude. Fortunately, the great importance of never asking for what I wanted had been instilled in me at an early age, something that has served me well in my adult life.** My mother did this so I wouldn’t ask for candy at the grocery store, but it had the unexpected effect of turning me into a passive-aggressive smart aleck.

I’ll give you an example of something that happened when I was five or six: When my dad went on one of his infamous tirades against an inanimate object, I couldn’t say to him, “Daddy, I don’t like when you lose your temper. I wish you would stop screaming obscenities at the Datsun.”*** Instead, I stood at the kitchen door and yelled into the garage, “How can a car be a stupid son of a bitch? It’s a car!” — whereupon one of my older siblings spirited me away to their room.

Clearly, I had a natural talent that I could develop into something truly obnoxious.

So, back to that lady in Hawaii who didn’t find me cute anymore. Even at nine, I knew she was being a superficial jerk, and I wished the way she treated me didn’t bother me so much. So at some point after our return home, I figured out that if someone disapproved of something about me, the best course of action was to act like I didn’t care.

This was hard for me because, as the baby of a large family who was taught that her greatest accomplishment was going on a trip to Lucky without begging for a box of Trix, I sought the approval of older people.

So there were faltering steps. When the pastor’s wife at my mom’s not-quite-a-cult, we-just-meet-in-a-house-on-Saturday-nights-and-speak-in-tongues-for-six-hours church chided my friend and me for being too noisy when we were shut in a guest room while the adults praised the Lord loudly and incomprehensibly in the living room, I burst into tears. But when she said we wouldn’t be allowed to come to their weekly meetings anymore if we didn’t learn to be quiet, I managed to gather myself, and through my tears, say, “Well maybe I don’t want to come to your stupid church anyway.”

I meant it. I didn’t want to go to church with my mom. It meant being in a small room with nothing to do for hours, and I felt uncomfortable hearing the adults wailing and sobbing while they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit.**** I much preferred staying home and watching The Golden Girls while my dad “babysat” me. But I didn’t have the skills to communicate that. It would have seemed too much like asking for something I wanted.

I don’t remember what happened immediately after my teary rebellion. My mom probably yanked me out of there, delivering a talk about respect on the drive home while I fell asleep in the passenger seat. (It was 2 a.m., after all.) What I do remember is that my mom never made me go to “church” with her again.

Clearly, not caring and saying so in the most ungracious way possible was the best way to get what I wanted.

–
* I had been in the local newspaper because of that lunchbox. See Appendix A.
** This has not served me well in my adult life.|
*** Because this is what normal six-year-olds talk like, right?
**** If you’ve never been around charismatic Evangelical Christians, let me quickly educate you about what they’re like: They will use any reason at all to start speaking in tongues. An important life event, for example — like a children’s pool party.

First, yes, I am going to keep posting this. Second, I am sorry that I don’t have the picture to accompany this section yet. I’ll have to find it in the photo album archives at my mom’s house. Third, I hope everyone gets that the thing about me “pursuing coolness” is tongue-in-cheek. I do [...]]]>

First, yes, I am going to keep posting this. Second, I am sorry that I don’t have the picture to accompany this section yet. I’ll have to find it in the photo album archives at my mom’s house. Third, I hope everyone gets that the thing about me “pursuing coolness” is tongue-in-cheek. I do not think I am a cool. Fourth, yes, I do realize that the way the lady in part one treated me could have had nothing to do with anything wrong with me. That is why I almost used the title “Why Do I Think Everyone Secretly Hates Me? What’s Wrong with Me?” instead of “Faking It,” but I thought using a question as a title was too obviously ripping off Mindy Kaling.

Okay, onward. This makes more sense if you pick it up from part one.

Funky May Day

I had an idea that this new thing I had to be since I wasn’t cute anymore was related to the outfit I had gotten for the previous year’s May Day at my school. An elementary school dance recital is an unlikely place to discover cool, but here’s how it went:

My third-grade teacher, a certain Miss Gustas — who was young and a little hippy-ish and against whom I had some unresolved enmity because she had replaced my beloved Mrs. McCormick, an elegant older lady who wore her white hair in a French roll and impeccable, colorful suits — declared that for our class’s May Day dance we were all too look “funky.”

This was 1986, so “funky” was a good thing, and apparently consisted of stirrup leggings, colorful oversized shirts, and enormous bows in teased hair. (I don’t remember what it meant for boys; I didn’t really care about them then.) For several of my friends and me, the “funky” requirement meant having to buy a whole new outfit. This was back when eight-year-old girls wore dresses with sashes at the waist and white tights to school, instead of miniature, sparklier versions of their mother’s casual clothes.

Armed with this mandate, I declared to my mother that I needed new clothes. I came out of this venture with a pair of black stirrup pants that were baggy on my scrawny legs and a white shirt with a print of large dark pink stars.

Pictures from the dance show a slightly mustachioed eight-year-old girl who seems to have extra knees and elbows, but for me, it was the beginning of faking cool. I felt different in those funky clothes, and over the last weeks of school, I would pair those black stirrup pans with anything oversized I could get my hands on.

My favorite was a navy blue blouse with a white pinstripe and collar that I had rescued from my older sister’s castoffs. That’s what I was wearing when Miss Gustas told me, “You’re looking much more funky these days, Jennifer.” I was a little thrilled, but also a little bewildered, and I was too awkward to know how to take a compliment that also seemed kind of like an insult.

“Thanks,” I said, nervously adjusting the giant red net bow in my hair.

Inspired by Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling, I have begun using my travel time to work to “write my memoirs,” as old Baby Boomers call it. Being under 35, I am, of course, one of those young people that those same olds worry are dangerously self-obsessed, so it is incredibly easy for me to [...]]]>

Inspired by Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling, I have begun using my travel time to work to “write my memoirs,” as old Baby Boomers call it. Being under 35, I am, of course, one of those young people that those same olds worry are dangerously self-obsessed, so it is incredibly easy for me to write about myself. I have more than 2500 words already.

What I’m posting here is the first — and probably last — draft I’ll write of this. It’s just an exercise in self-reflection without being too damn moody about it. (My drafting process is as follows: Imaginary Draft — written in my head while I take a shower; Rough Draft — obnoxiously scrawled in a Moleskine while I ride BART; First Draft — typed on the computer and then shared with strangers for some reason.)

Here is part one of chapter one, in a work I am calling (for now)

Faking It
My Lifelong Pursuit of Coolness and Competence 

Cuteness Lost

“Cool” is such a weird concept — one of those paradoxes we don’t even think about. It’s all about image, and at the same time all about not caring about what your image is. Coolness isn’t like being blonde or French. Like webbed toes or superfluous nipples, you can’t fake it having it. You’re either born with it or you’re a perfectly normal person: boring, like everyone else.

When do we start wanting to be cool? When do we even become aware of what cool is?

I think the beginning of my awakening came when I was nine. My second nephew had just been born, so my parents and I took a trip to Hawaii, where my brother, who was in the Army, was stationed. While we were there, we visited a family friend. I was excited to see her because she’d made much of me when I had first visited Hawaii two years before. She’d called me beautiful and bought me a little porcelain figurine of a girl in a kimono at the Buddhist temple.

This time, though, when she saw me, she could hardly muster a strained smile. I was confused. That night, I thought it over on my temporary bed on my brother’s couch, while the waves of Oahu’s North Shore crashed just a few yards away.

“What’s wrong with me?” CRASH.

“Why doesn’t she like me now?” CRASH.

And then — CRASH — I understood.

I wasn’t cute anymore.*

In the two years since she’d seen me last, I’d turned form a sweet, small-for-my-age seven-year-old with a missing tooth and braided pigtails into a gangly-limbed child with an overbite, crooked bangs, and these weird light patches that appeared on my face when I spent time in the sun. I was awkward.

I considered this. I didn’t feel any different on the inside, except that I knew the multiplication table and had lost my adorable speech impediment, thanks to speech therapy the year before. But it was obvious, based on how this woman was treating me, that I had changed.

I couldn’t go back to being cute. My feet were too big, my legs were too skinny, and I definitely had a mustache coming in.

I had to be something else. I didn’t know yet, but that something else was cool.

I chose this photo because, against the majestic backdrop of the azure waves of Oahu's North Shore, my knock knees and bad posture are perfectly silhouetted.

*As I look over pictures from this trip, I have realized that, aside from all the normal 9-year-old awkwardness, I was still a cute little girl, just not as cute as I used to be. What the hell was wrong with that lady? She is dead now, so I can’t ask her.

The news is out: I am now working at Image Comics as their PR and Marketing Coordinator. Today was my first day and it was a whirlwind.

Please note that Sarah deLaine, who previously held that title is still here — she is now the Event Coordinator and focusing on conventions, trade shows, and [...]]]>

The news is out: I am now working at Image Comics as their PR and Marketing Coordinator. Today was my first day and it was a whirlwind.

Please note that Sarah deLaine, who previously held that title is still here — she is now the Event Coordinator and focusing on conventions, trade shows, and other events. She has her hands full with Image Expo only five weeks away! We’ll be coordinating our efforts — I’m handling press and media leading up to the convention, while she is taking care of in-convention matters.

I am very tired and need to go to bed, but before I do, I have to thank everyone who has congratulated me, wished me well, and told me they enjoyed working with me at SLG.

I had a hard time at the start of the day, thinking about the place where I started my career and my ten great years there, and then trying to cope with being apart from my son, who is two and going into daycare for the first time. However, the support the comics community has given me has helped so much and made me very grateful I am part of this industry.

I also need to thank SLG’s Supreme Commander Dan Vado, who hired me and mentored me through all the intricacies of the comics world. When I took a job as a production assistant to help me pay my university tuition, I never thought I would be Editor in Chief in a year and a half. But Dan believed in me and entrusted many aspects of his life’s work to me, which gave me the opportunity to learn and gain confidence. His flexibility and understanding allowed me to earn my master’s degree while I worked and to take on limited responsibilities while I cared for my son. He inspired me to do my best for the creators we published, and I hope I did as much good as I was capable of. I can sincerely say I would not be in the position I am now if it were not for him.

Dan isn’t my boss anymore, but I hope he, and everyone else at SLG will always be my friend.

This is a post that I’ve been trying to write for a few days.

Friday was officially my last day at SLG Publishing, the company where I began my career in the comics industry and worked for ten years, most of them as Editor in Chief. My decade at SLG was, I suspect, like [...]]]>

This is a post that I’ve been trying to write for a few days.

Friday was officially my last day at SLG Publishing, the company where I began my career in the comics industry and worked for ten years, most of them as Editor in Chief. My decade at SLG was, I suspect, like no other decade anyone has spent working anywhere. I had great co-workers and got to work with fantastic creators, all of whom I will miss very much. (Though because this is comics and a community like no other, we will always stay in contact.)

There’s too much I want to say, so I just won’t try.

SLG President Dan Vado and me at Comic-Con International 2008

More behind the jump.

I’m always hesitant to participate in “Best of” year-end lists because I don’t ever feel like I’ve read enough to declare anything the best. I don’t get around to reading a lot of important works until well after they’re published, and this year is no different.

Instead, I’ll make a list of comics and [...]]]>

I’m always hesitant to participate in “Best of” year-end lists because I don’t ever feel like I’ve read enough to declare anything the best. I don’t get around to reading a lot of important works until well after they’re published, and this year is no different.

Instead, I’ll make a list of comics and graphic novels that were published in 2011 that I especially enjoyed.

Blabber Blabber Blabber: Everything Volume One by Lynda Barry (Drawn and Quarterly)
Lynda Barry is a singular voice in comics. No one else is even close to being like her. This first volume of an omnibus of her work collects her early comics, with her commentary. Nothing is more helpful to aspiring writers and artists than an insightful master’s examination of her craft’s development. Barry encourages copying drawings the artist admires, the kind of exercise that used to be part of an artist’s apprenticeship but now are often avoided in an age when individual expression is supposed to be the purpose of art. She’s famous as a teacher who helps people develop their creativity now, a pedagogical impulse that is apparent very early on in her career, as many strips encourage readers to try their hand at drawing. (Publishers Weekly review here.)

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton (Drawn and Quarterly)
I’m one of those Beatonites who has been reading this strip online for the last few years. Tech geeks may rule the school now, but Beaton gives us history and literary nerds something to snicker about as we revel in both her cleverness and our own. Her way of giving historical figures contemporary attitudes and vocabularies to make the past seem present is key to her work’s charm, as is that expression of crazed determination she’s so good at drawing.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, adapted by Peter Gillis, art by Renae deLiz (inks and colors by Ray Dillon) (IDW)
The individual issues were published in 2011, but the collection was published in January of 2011. Like so many women my age, I loved the animated The Last Unicorn as a child. This beautiful adaptation brings in a little more of the prose style of the novel and just makes me happy.

Marzi by Marzi Sowa and Syvlain Savoia (Vertigo)
This is an engrossing and affecting memoir that offers insight both into a young girl’s perspective and life in Communist Poland on the cusp of revolution. (Publishers Weekly review here.)

The Royal Historian of Oz by Tommy Kovac and Andy Hirsch (SLG)
Though willing to have a sense of humor about Oz fandom, this story still shines with love for L. Frank Baum’s creation. It’s set in a run-down future, with a man who longs for escape and wonder and his down-to-earth teenage son as its main characters who find themselves running smack into the reality of Oz. This was produced while I worked at SLG, but it really was midwifed (so to speak) by the company’s president, Dan Vado. I just did production work on it, though I had the advantage of being able to read Tommy’s delightful scripts and see the process of Andy bringing it to life with his art.

Sergio Aragonés’ Funnies by Sergio Aragones (Bongo)
I was a fan of Sergio Aragonés before I even knew who he was. As a kid, I used to hang out with my cousin Greg and read MAD, and I loved his pantomime “A MAD Look at..” This monthly comic has some of those great wordless strips, but my favorite feature is the biographical story in every issue. Aragonés tells stories about his childhood in Mexico with great warmth and recounts the innocent exploits of his youth with humor.

Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang (DC)
This is the book that got me, for the first time ever, to buy a monthly comic published by one of the Big Two. Its mythic take on the iconic character reminds me of something Vertigo would have produced at its apex. It’s smart and it trusts its readers to be smart, too. The art is stupendous, and Diana has the right air of almost haughty distance that befits an immortal Amazon (and, as it turns out… well, SPOILER). I hate the damned choker, though.

You see, I posted this image on Facebook with the note “A campaign to teach boys and men that it is their responsibility to stop sexual violence!”