Autobiography of a Fangrrrl - Part 1

My friend Lady J is a smart, tough, sweet-hearted comic geek. I've asked for her take on comic culture, when and how she started reading and what it all means to her as a feminist, and she's delivered! Thanks sister! Your voice is much appreciated! 

Man, I can remember the first time I was opened up to the world of fangrrrlness. I was 9 or 10, and my brother Adicus had just had his appendix taken out, and he was still in the hospital from the procedure. I’m not sure how long he stayed in there, or when it was exactly (fall, winter, etc.), or where she got it (there were only two nerd stores in Huntington), but I do remember begging my mother for a comic book (Ad had gotten a few because he was sick and bored in the hospital). It was the early 90s, and I was almost a tweenager, so I had already been exposed to the awesomeness that was the TMNT, She-Ra, Thundercats, Voltron, and the many cartoon series based on comic books that came out in the early 90s. I had never read a comic book, however - until that year. 

I can only assume that my mother picked the first one she saw on the shelf. It was a 1993 issue of the X-Men, and it contained love, and sadness, and strong women, and viruses, and grudges; needless to say, my 10-year-old brain was blown. For about a year, that was the only comic book I had in my possession, and it was mine. Not Ad’s. Not Tim’s. Mine. And I loved it. I read it almost every day when I got home from school, and it never got boring.
Then after being absent from my early childhood, my father suddenly started making appearances in my life - taking us to the movies, taking us to comic book shoppes, taking us to get pizza. It wasn’t until we went to the comic book store as a family that I got a second comic book, and actually, it wasn’t a comic, so much as it was a manga. The manga was called The Dirty Pair. On the cover, were two girls, scantily clad in yellow leather “suits,” holding machine guns. I can barely remember the content, but I ended up buying 6 or 7 of them in middle school, so I must’ve loved them. When I was 11, I discovered Barbie and Archie comics. I even got a subscription to Marvel’s Barbie - hey, I was 11, leave me alone! I really needed to know if Skipper was going to wear that purple dress to her middle school dance, and if Barbie was going to find her lost poodle at the zoo!
For a while, I got “too cool” for comics, manga, and anime, and I didn’t rediscover my love for nerdiness until I was 15. Sure, I had seen a few episodes of Buffy, and I loved reruns of the Batman, but once we got rid of cable, I kind of lost interest - then I was forced to take a world history class with a fellow freaky nerd punk guy. His name was Richard. He had really bad breathe, blue hair, had ADD, ate ritalin like crazy, and was obsessed with Nirvana (the band), anime, and manga. One day I noticed that he was lingering around the classroom door, and so I asked him what was up. He said that he had a VHS for me to borrow, and that I REALLY NEEDED TO WATCH IT. It was an anime. He knew that I really liked Battle of the Planets, Gundam and Sailor Moon, so he thought that I should watch this show, too. I did. Holy crap, did I love it! It was called Rurouni Kenshin, an anime about a goofy, but endearing, traveling samurai. After I watched about 30 episodes, he informed me that he didn’t have any more of the show recorded, but that he was in the process of getting a few VHSes off of Ebay. I don’t think I ever borrowed any more VHSes from him, but he did let me borrow a manga called Ghost in the Shell. Oh boy. Mind blown. I loved that manga as well. After reading the Ghost in the Shell, I started renting anime VHSes from Blockbuster. I think, at the time, I rented every single one they had in the anime section. It didn’t matter what it was. I really liked anime. I was a huge dork. Or so I thought....

Stay tuned for the next installment of "Autobiography of a Fangrrrl" by Lady J - Coming Wednesday... Enjoy!