At a tender age, I confess, I....
wait a minute; I can plead the Fifth!
I....
*sigh *
Here goes. When my first-grade classmates read "Dick and Jane" (yes, I'm old enough to have read those books in school), I was reading fairy tales, especially those with downtrodden girls like Cinderella and Snow White magically transforming into princesses and meeting gallant princes who sweep them off their feet and into the Happily Ever After.
That wasn't so bad. (Deep Breath)
I was really captivated by romance, at an age far too young for this, and I kind of blame the soap operas my mom watched daily. "The Edge of Night." I still remember the names: Adam Drake, a lawyer, and his secretary, Nicole Travis.
Yes, that's right: I remember those names after 50 years. Because things learned early in life stay with us, while things more recent to us get lost. It's because the file cabinets of our brains are uncluttered in childhood. The older we get, the more names, dates, places, and people we have crammed into the memory bank of our brains. Now that we have The Cloud, I get frequent warnings on my smart phone about how my Cloud is full, and I need to buy more storage or purge stuff from my phone. Of course, I purge.
I wish I could buy more storage inside my brain.
But I digress.
If Adam Drake failed to propose to Nicole by New Year's Eve,
she would give up on him. And marry someone else. How long it took for them to get together--how many obstacles in the way! With the utmost suspense, hearts pounding, we watched the clock tick toward twelve, and...
"TUNE IT TOMORROW!"
Gaaaaahhhh!!
Romance. Soap operas. More addicting to me than the white stuff. (Sugar, that is, most ubiquitous of drugs.)
As I said, I was young. Everything is the mother's fault, so if I forget to plead the Fifth, I won't forget to blame Mom for the early interest I took in romance, the fictional version, because I didn't see any in real life. But I saw it in books and fairy tales and TV shows. And for some reason, it stayed with me. I internalized it!
God have mercy on my ruined soul!
And so, while other first-graders were dutifully doing their homework, I was dreaming of fictional heroines thwarted by their controlling fathers but ultimately eloping with their true loves. I wrote the words and drew the simple line drawings on the backsides of paper my grandma brought home from the scrap bin of a college where she worked as a janitor. I also wrote on those pads of white paper from the bank. So did my sisters. E.g.,
My First Epistle
was on bank paper, stapled together. I graduated to 8x11 sheets of scrap paper. All of these "graphic novels," primitive and childish as they were, got destroyed by my sister, but that's another story. From memory, a hasty sketch and the only title I can recall:
says she cringes
at her debut novel written in November, only half a year earlier, but if my "debut" romances had not been shredded and burned, I would be blushing still, fifty years later.
Five Minutes Are Up,
and never have I been happier for an excuse to change the subject.
"Comic"book is the wrong term for what I was doing in grade school, because the only thing comical about it was how fierce, passionate, and earnest I was in creating this dreadful pulp fiction.
So, what is the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel?
A graphic novel is a book (not a periodical), made up of comics content, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized works. A comic book is a stapled pamphlet, published as a periodical.
Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alph. The term gained popularity, and "graphic novel" became a category in book stores in 2001. What is the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel?
Now, to purge the early conditioning of the {{{ Romance! }}} genre from my subconscious!