Before the X-Men came along, I wanted to grow up to be the Batman. I was devouring DC Comics at the time, the only large publisher around. My parents worried about me. It was the era of Fredric Wertham and his anti-comics crusade, the original blame-the-fillinthemediahere scapegoater. Worse yet, I was a girl, a little Midwestern girl in an average Midwestern town in an average middle-class family, and I had this … obsession.

I was obsessed with comic books. Not only comics, actually, but the entire sequential storytelling medium, a big name for what I only knew as comics and which included newspaper strips like Brenda Starr and Captain Easy. If it had a serious, continuous story, it was irresistible. Then I found an issue of The Brave and the Bold in my desk in elementary school and the fix was in. I was hooked. I had to have more. And more. I knew the location of every magazine and spinner rack in my town. I would ride my bicycle for miles in search of those four-color dreams.

Is it a genetic thing? Are some of us born with a love for sequential storytelling, with a passion for the visual story laid out in panels with these funky white balloons popping out of people’s mouths? I don’t know, but if you’re reading this, you’re one of us. We’re mutants, though I would have preferred a better power.

My parents tried to make me stop. I was forbidden to buy more comics. I would  …