Introduction

Greetings and welcome to my blog! My name is John or Themysciran Knight here online. I intend to write about my favorite comic book character-Supergirl!

I’d like to share my own comics history to begin. Most of my exposure to comics book characters has come from movies and TV series such as Supergirl, Superboy, Batman The Animated Series, and the Batman film series. Growing up in the 1980s and into the 1990s I attempted to read some proper comics, but I never stuck with them for long. For example, I remember buying Peter David’s Supergirl. The book was disappointing to me then because David’s Linda Danvers was not like how I imagined Supergirl to be. The 1984 Supergirl movie then and continues to be a huge influence in how I view the character of Kara Zor El. Linda Danvers confused me then, and I was baffled by how she had wings of fire and telekinesis. Also, I have vague memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. Overall, the experience of reading comics was not a major part of my youth. Movies and television provided everything a comic in some ways could not for me- character voice, music, action or movement, and interesting visuals. Newspaper strips, however, was a major exception and I continue to enjoy them. Such strips include Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Peanuts, and The Far Side.

In 2004, my younger brother’s experience taking a college course on comic books inspired me to give comic books another chance. I did some research at amazon.com, and I selected Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Phil Jimenez’s Wonder Woman: Paradise Lost. I fell in love with the medium! I discovered films and TV can get things amazingly right like Batman The Animated Series or casting Helen Slater as the Girl of Steel. Those experiences can help inform the reading experience like providing the actor’s or actresses’ voice to the character or using music. But they can get things horribly wrong as well like in the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I came to realize the right combination of words and art truly does provide a satisfactory reading and visual experience. So, a huge thank you to writers Miller, Moore, and Jimenez!

Thus, I began to buy graphic novels. I soon discovered that not all of a particular writer’s run on a series is collected in graphic novel format. Nor do entire comic book series become compiled in books either. This makes it difficult to sometimes understand a character’s history or some previous event. Thus, it became necessary to begin buying monthly titles for those series I really want to read as each issue comes out rather than waiting for the possibility they may or may not be collected in a graphic novel.

So, hopefully this little history gives everyone an idea of my comic book history!