I’ve never taken part in a meme before, so I figure this looks like a good place to start. (It’s all Claudia’s fault.) Two book blogs, Worducopia and Color Online, have started it (CORA standing for Color Online Reader Activist) with the intent to promote diversity in literature. And while prose books are the focus of the two blogs, I’m gonna represent comics with this meme (I doubt anyone will object). Sometimes it’ll be about black comics, sometimes it won’t. I’ll probably post this on Mondays starting next week. We’ll see how long I can make it last.

The questions for this week in italics:

Which is the character who’s the most different from you? (And how? Use this as an excuse to tell us your own background and anything else about yourself that’s important to your self-identity).

The obvious answer would seem to be any superhero or supervillain or any fantasy character in general, but more than enough has been and is being written about superheroes, both in print and on the Net, and I’d rather talk about comics that are off the beaten path. Keep in mind that despite the way the questions are phrased, I don’t consider these the “absolute” answers, just one among a number that I could just as easily write about also.

If the author of an autobiographical comic can be considered a character in their own book – and why not? – one name that instantly springs to mind is Ellen Forney in Monkey Food. I remember first hearing about her at SPX, where her collection of “I Was Seven in ‘75″ strips debuted, and despite the buzz on it I missed out. When I finally did get my hands on the book, well, I just fell in love with it instantly. I am a straight black male who came of age in the 80s. Forney is a homosexual white woman who came of age in the 70s. I’d say that’s pretty different.

Monkey Food chronicles Forney’s wonder years in a very bright-eyed, fanciful and just plain fun manner. While it’s definitely written for adults, there are so many moments that make you feel like a kid again, and while Forney presents her childhood self as girly-girl as you can get, something about her character really spoke to me. We see little Ellen and her girlfriends play hand-clap games, make up their own fashion styles, reading (and secretly enjoying) the books of Judy Blume, babysitting, and other girly-girl stuff, which I never did (well, okay, I did read some Judy Blume books), but something about the way Forney presents all of this – complete with obligatory 70s pop culture references – made me feel like I was living this life as well.

Certainly the art style helps. Forney uses a uniform line, probably with a brush, to create a cartoon style that’s suggestive of childhood. It’s never too detailed or over-rendered, but it’s self-assured even if it seems awkward in places.

It’s not all kid stuff, though. We also see Ellen interacting with her brother and especially her ultra-liberal parents, doing things like going to a nude beach, throwing a joint party, going to see Saturday Night Fever (and wondering about some of the more adult elements of the movie) and going to a Unitarian church, things that my ultra-conservative upbringing had absolutely no part of. Ellen gets exposed to ideas that she may have been way too young for, but they don’t keep her from being a kid. While I wouldn’t say I had a sheltered childhood, my parents would’ve definitely frowned on this method of child-rearing. Maybe that’s part of why seeing it in this book appealed to me.

Monkey Food is the kind of book I love coming back to again and again because of its sincerity and openness in the face of a coming-of-age story that may seem unusual and unconventional to some – like me.

Which is the author (this could be fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.) who is (or was) the most different from you?

Certainly someone like Will Eisner was a creator very different from me in many ways. The son of European immigrants, whose Jewish identity was a large part of who he was, growing up during the (first) Great Depression and having to make a living at an early age, perceiving comics completely differently from the overwhelming majority of his peers and spending his life trying to elevate the artform long before the rest of the industry caught up to him, making comics that have stood the test of time in a style second to none and continuing to do so into his 80s. He was an American original, and we’ll not see his like again.