| From
the July/August 2008 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Guilty Pleasures
The 3,000 Skeletons in My Closet
BY JORDAN SONNENBLICK
 lame
it on the haircuts. If Mike the barber hadn’t kept a stack
of Marvel comic books in his shop, I might have picked up a weekly
Sports Illustrated or People magazine habit instead
of jonesing for the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and that holy
of holies, the Uncanny X-Men. And my life would have been drastically
changed — forever! See, that last sentence illustrates
my problem: thanks to those old comics, I actually think in those
portentous, cliffhanging sentences. It’s too early in my writing
career to tell, but what if this yen for the dramatic one day leads
to — my DOOM?
“Die, Avengers! You shall not live to learn
my final secret!” That’s the actual bubble dialogue
of my very first Avengers comic (#138, August 1975). Looking back,
I am shocked to realize that I first read that when I was only seven
years old. Less shocking to you, the reader, will be the revelation
that my early, and persistent, love of comics above all other literary
forms was discouraged and/or mocked by my peers, my teachers, and
— most brutally — my big sister. The grownups thought
that comics would lead me astray, the other kids on the school bus
thought that comics fans were dorks, and my sister . . .
she just liked the sound my comics made as she ripped them in half.
Slowly.
So I hid my comics. They were under my bed, stuffed
under my mattress, in special unmarked white boxes in my closet.
At school, I would pretend I was intent on the book that was open
on my desk, while really I was peering inside the desk, keeping
up with my Spider-Man studies.
The haters were right, by the way. Comics did
lead me astray and — arguably — mark me as a dork. But
at least I’m not as geeky as my fellow YA novelist Barry Lyga.
He fell in love with Marvel’s inferior rival, DC Comics. I
don’t know how someone so utterly clueless could write such
great books.
YA
author Jordan Sonnenblick’s latest book is a middle-grade
novel, Dodger and Me (Feiwel).
|
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From the July/August 2008
issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
