By: Dameon Hairston
My father was a big fan of Superman, so we saw the Superman movies with Christopher Reeve and I really enjoyed those. When I was in high school is when I actually bought my first comic book, which was the Marriage of Superman and Lois Lane and I was super excited about that because I had been watching the TV show Lois and Clark which I adored. I'm a huge Superman fan. I mean a lot of people aren't big fans of his, cause they think he's too pure and innocent so on and so forth, and that's what I like. I like having somebody who's actually a good guy. Anyway so I read comics up at that point a little, and then I got into college and met my future husband. And I'm the sort of person that has to always be reading something, I read all the time, I mean when I was young I would read the back of the cereal box during breakfast because I just had to be reading. So I would go visit him in college and he always had stacks of comic books around cause he grew up reading comic books and every time he would go on a trip he would buy comic books. And so I started sorta flipping through them and at first I thought um this is just kinda silly, but then I actually got into the stories. And when I'd go and visit him I'd be like do you have the next one of that and the next one of that. My husband realized that I'm not into violent comics, I like ones that are funny or ones that are sorta straightforward and uplifting, positive story lines. So he got me really into Excalibur, which was a branch of X-Men that was like late 90s early 2000s. Especially I fell in love with the character Nightcrawler because he's funny but he also has depth and he can be serious but I really really enjoyed the fact that he loved classic movies which I loved and he was very handsome and dashing, debonair and in a way in that I hadn't really seen in comics before. To have that kinda depth of character. Which got me into the X-Men. And the X-men sorta their whole thing is having depth of character and not just being good, but also having a good side having a bad side you know. Maybe Magneto can be saved, maybe Jean is going to change into Dark Phoenix. So I really enjoyed that about the X-men. Then shortly before we got married, when we were engaged I moved to Rockville, Maryland and I did not know anyone in Rockville. My husband was at that point still in college and he would come up on the weekends. On the weekends we would just drive around and look for things to do because we didn't know anything about Rockville. And he would go through the yellowbook, back in the day where there were yellowbooks, and he would find comic book stores and gaming stores and things that sounded interesting and he'd say let's go to this place, lets go to this place. He found this place called Adventure comics, that was on Rockville Pike, and we checked it out, and the guy who was behind the counter when we walked in, his name was Joe. He was super friendly and not like, I've been to a couple comic book stores with my husband and they'd always been kinda creepy and all the guys there were like “OH IT'S A WOMAN” you know and I was like, I did not enjoy it at all. I wanted to look at the comics but I was getting unpleasant attention from the men. Anyway so we walked in and Joe wasn't like that at all, he was just super friendly and warm and asked me what i liked and he introduced me to manga and he suggested Oh My Goddess which I am obsessed with, and he suggested also Teri Mor and Strangers in Paradise and some of the indie comics that really have better characterization of female characters. So Joe was like you might like this, you might like this. And Joe said to me so every Wednesday night we have comic book night and everybody comes and people bring their dinners and it's like a big party. So I thought what the heck, I don't know a single person in Rockville, I don't have a thing to do during the week. I was going to my job and then going home and watching TV cause I had nothing. So I was like I'll go on a Wednesday night, and so I started going every Wednesday night and I became good friends with the number of people that were there. They introduced me to other comics but it became you know part of my weekly routine to go there and then just check out the new comics and to try new comics and to pick up a manga or pick up a trade or whatever. Then my husband and I got married and we moved to Elkridge but we still would go down to Rockville every Wednesday night, quite a haul, but all of our friends were there. The Wednesday night tradition continued until Adventure Comics, sadly, had to go out of business, but we stayed friends with joe. He got married; We're friends with his wife. They have a daughter; She's friends with our son. They're both really into comics. You know it's just become sorta part of our culture. Some years after that I went to my first convention and then the next year I went in a costume and I won a costume contest. I dressed as Kitty Pryde from the X-men in the mid 90s style in blue. My husband made Widget for me. That was exciting, and then I started doing cosplay. We were really really into that until you know we had a child. And then having a child really puts a damper on how much time you have for cosplay and conventions. But now that he's 8 and a half we're starting to go to more conventions and he's definitely into comics; He knows all the characters, he knows Nightcrawler's my favorite, he's really into Teen Titans and all these sorts of things. Even this weekend we went to Third Eye Comics in Annapolis because my husband had been there. It's incredible. I just walked in and was like WOW. It's enormous. And they had everything. With the rise of the comic book movies it's given sorta another avenue, where we can enjoy it together as a family. So yeah it's just part of our family culture. Part of what we talk about with our friends. It's just become this part of ourselves. I mean I've always been into Star Wars, been obsessed with Star Wars since basically I was born, but the comic book thing, it came on later in life but it's still an important part of who I am and how I view the world.
Dameon's Connection
I’m an advent comic book reader myself and always connect more with teachers that enjoy them. Learning about how Mrs. Bloedorn got into comics was really entertaining and made me feel a little bit closer to her.
