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Wow, I didn't know that I was a part of Persephone's conversion! That's so cool.
I've had a fair amount of success in turning non-comic reading people (almost all of them women) on to comics. I think one of the two most important things at first is to show people that there is more variety in comics subject matter than they might know about, and second that not all comic art is ugly and poorly designed.
I think you've got to play it by ear, some people are obviously different than others. For a lot of people, I would definitely avoid pushing the typical superhero classics. As great as X-Statix, New X-Men, and The Watchmen are, they're still superhero comics and will turn a lot of people off.
Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Adrien Tomine are all great folks for people to start out with. I think that they tend to be very accessable to people familiar with modern literature and films, their work is carried in most bookstores and very respectable. Their art is clear and attractive, and very easy to follow for novice readers. That's an important thing - it's amazing how many people don't really know how to 'read' a comic book's visual language, and there's a lot of comics artists out there who don't make it easy on the reader.
There's so many good books that I'd want to recommend!
There's a great new book called Clumsy which was done by a guy named Jeffrey Brown, and it's a collection of vignettes that tell the story of his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, mostly focusing on all the tiny sweet happy moments along with some of the more complicated bits. It's really amazing, very well observed and articulated. The drawing is extremely crude, but it does the job well - for what he lacks in draftsmanship, he makes up for with a knack for visual storytelling and capturing nuanced emotions. It's a very accessable book, I think that anyone who's ever been in a good relationship that didn't work out will be able to get a lot out of it.
Another book which might be good for some new readers is Phoebe Gloeckner's new book The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, which is a combination of prose and comics that may be a good way of easing some people into comics who are more used to straight prose fiction. The book is set up as a diary of a young girl in the early 70s who is finding her sexuality, but is sleeping with her mother's boyfriend and getting involved with some very creepy, negative characters and situations. Like everything Gloeckner writes, it's very depressing, but mostly because it's so well observed and feels so real. |
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