Same Exact Passion

I remember the first time I walked into a comic book store.

Not the friendly comics and anime store, the one down Monroe that I often begged my parents to stop by so I could spend two hours picking from a rack of five dollar DVDs. Not the store with both giant mecha and Wolverine T-shirts lining the walls, one side filled with brightly colored keychains and the other with "classy" figurines of Poison Ivy and Batgirl, comics crammed together in claustrophobic rows. Not the one with hand-made jewelry of Sailor Moon and the Elric brothers right next to the ice cube trays of Han Solo frozen in carbonate (which for the longest time I thought was Kryptonite). Not my store.

No, just a plain old comic book store. Covered with faded posters, there were three men in their late twenties conversing in quiet tones about the state of the Batman industry, their varying levels of douchy beard hair speaking to to their varying levels of geek.

They stopped and looked at me when walked in. I had just gotten my temps, so my Dad and I thought we would stop in at the comic book store we had spotted on the way there. I remember that I was wearing a Naruto shirt. Not because I was trying to impress a bunch of comic aficionados with my knowledge, as they probably thought, but because I liked my Naruto shirt. I still wear it under my sweatshirt all the time, ancient as it is.

They left me alone, only giving me a precursory lofty I'm-better-than-you look or two, as I browsed the comics. The titles of the small packets all seemed to swim before my eyes, as they always did. I wished I was more into comics, I really did. I had just never had the opportunity. I plucked one from the pile and flipped through it, smiling as I recognized several of the characters from this 1930s Golden Age book I had read to try and get into comics. Trust me, it wasn't for lack of trying.

I noticed a shelf of manga and steered towards it while my Dad, being himself, was trying to chat up the guy with the worst beard, which meant the biggest nerd. I wish he wouldn't. I didn't want to talk to these people more than I had to.

The moment my fingers skimmed the manga I felt the atmosphere change. The manga was dusty, the pages yellow. I noticed Trigun and said to my Dad, louder than usual to try to ease the tension, "Hey, look, they have Trigun."

My Dad pronounced that he loved Trigun and snatched the book from me.

"Oh yes," said the Mega Beard who worked there, his tone politely snide. "We've had the...manga...here for quite some time. For people who don't really like comics."

It wasn't just the way he said it. It was the way he looked at me, like I was faking it, like I had no right to be in a store for people who really cared, that stuck with me.

Because, I promise you, I had cared about and cried for more animated characters than most people cry for their grandparents. I have spent hundreds of dollars of merchandise and gone to conventions and spent nearly every waking minute thinking about some nerd passion or other, doodling through classes and daydreaming though lunches, never afraid to loudly tell people about it, because we're told as children to never ever pretend to be someone we're not and to always be ourselves and I live to that policy, whether or not they meant it when they told us that.

I write fanfiction and share it and wear an ermine keychain in my hair because the ermine would want it that way. I spend hours decorating my walls, taping one poster over another and re-taping them when they fall, with stronger tape, because there's always a damn blank spot somewhere, even if it means sacrificing a Walt Whitman poem for a handwritten poem from a friend about Hugo Weaving's butt. I don't think that man has ever had a map of Middle-earth fall on his face in the middle of the night because he ran out of room on his walls and had gotten his friends to call his favorite actors by their nicknames because they've heard about them so much that it just feels natural to call David Wenham Daisy now.

I certainly don't think, with that attitude of his, that he makes friends at every convention he goes to because of his ability to talk to people, that because of his obsessions with anime and television and Tolkien and passing knowledge of almost every other fandom that he can carry a conversation with almost every kind of nerd, even the one sitting in the corner of the convention completely bummed because of how no one likes their shows.

I will never forget the old man who saw my manga and asked me if I liked comics. In a manner of speaking I replied. He looked into my eyes and told me the story of the sisters who lived next to him, the ones who loved comics more than anything and were told they wouldn't amount to anything if they let that garbage rot their little brains while they should be playing with dolls, how they both have PhDs and live in Florida now. I will never forget the pride in that old man's eyes and how he could clearly see those little girls in me.

If that old man, more than eighty, could see that I had a passion, why couldn't someone who claims to be a fan? Why did that man look at me, another human being, and write me off because I was a girl, with my dad, and wearing a Naruto shirt? Just because we don't share the same exact passion? Just because I didn't ask to look at the Dungeons and Dragons die?

From now on, I'm sticking to the comics and anime store near m