comicses, my preciousss

My husband and I met and fell in love over comics. It happened like this: In my freshman year of college, I applied for membership in a writer's club. While I was signing up, the membership comittee head (now my good friend Bonki... yes, that really is her name!) was giving me the spiel about how they appreciated writers "from William Shakespeare to William Gibson, Allen Ginsberg to Alan Moore..." Since I kept nodding knowingly, she stopped and said, "Wait a minute. Do you actually know who Alan Moore is?" "Sure," I said. "Watchmen, right?" Whereupon Bonki turned away from me and yelled at this tall, good-lookin' guy in the corner of the room, "Dean! You gotta meet this girl!" So he and I started talking comics, and as early as that, he claims, he knew that he loved me. I kind of doubt it, but when he actually gave me his spare back issues of Sandman, I knew that he loved me.

Anyway, the point of this narration is that Dean just bought me volumes 1 and 2 of the Walt Simonson run of The Mighty Thor, which some rank as the best-ever period of that title except for the orginal Lee/Kirby era. Having never gotten my fangirl paws on the Lee/Kirby stuff, to me, Simonson's work is the definitive Thor, which I first read in my early teens, and was probably instrumental in shaping me into the folklore/mythology geek I am today. It was my first exposure to non-Greco-Roman myths. Verily, 'twas none other than Walter who didst teach me to speak thusly, in this outlandish and outmoded fashion! And I'm happy to report that the stories are just as satisfying a read for me today as they were some nineteen or so years ago. And to think that Simonson wrote, penciled, and inked every issue himself, month after month after month! In this age of six-month to two-year delays in comics publishing, it boggles the mind. (I admire Walt so much that I will even forgive him for being one of those reprehensible people who can both write and draw. But "Feh!" I say to the rest of you... and you know who you are...)

P.S. For those of you who've read 1602, my guess is that the little girl is Virginia Dare, who was the first child born of English parents in America (on Roanoke Island), and may or may not have been the queen of the Croatan Indians.