Secret Origin Time!

Okay, not really all that secret.  Lots of people know this stuff, I just needed a dang title.

When I was a wee fangirl growing up in Michigan, my dad worked for a toy company that later became part of Fundimensions, which was an umbrella name for MPC, Lionel Trains, and Craft Master in the mid-80s.  So, unlike most kids whose only exposure to the toy industry was TV commercials and the aisles of Toys R Us, I got pretty familiar right off the bat with the concept of licensed products.  That's not to say that I wasn't duped into liking dumb things just because a pitchman told me to, but I also knew that, when my dad went to New York not long after my birthday every year, he was going to Toy Fair to check out what was new and hot before it even hit the shelf.  I recall begging him to take me a few times, but it never worked, and in my head, New York soon became this mythical land that revolved around FAO Schwartz.  However, my dad would sometimes bring his work home with him: I still remember the night we played with a remote control R2-D2 that one of his buddies at Kenner loaned to him.  I have an RC Dalek these days that could probably run circles around it, but when I was three, this was the end-all-be-all pinnacle of coolness.  I treasured toys of all shapes and sizes, and would love to just look at the darn things in catalogs.

So that's the first link in the fangirl chain.  The second goes back to that R2-D2 toy: the mass-merchandise phenomenon that is Star Wars.  Again, I was three when this came out, and I shall be perfectly honest when I say that I screamed like the little girl I was when we saw it the theatre.  DARTH VADER SCARED ME TO DEATH!  Every time I peeked out from behind my fingers, there he was, glaring at me from the screen.  I actually refused to see The Empire Strikes Back when it came out because I knew Darth freakin' Vader was waiting to get me.  Mind you, this didn't stop me from playing with the action figures or reading the storybooks, but to go sit in that darkened auditorium?  No way no how!  Thank God I mellowed out by the time I got to elementary school, because some parent had managed to get a hold of the first reel of Star Wars, and that became a special treat over the years: going down to the lunchroom/gym, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and watching Luke and Han and Princess Leia get projected onto the cement wall (note to all you young'uns: this occurred in the days before home video, so this was the ONLY way to see the movie once it was out of the theatre!).

The third link comes from my mom, who taught me how to draw Snoopy when I was little.  Like most kids, I gravitated towards cartoons (both animated and in the newspaper), and by the age of 5, I had a goal of becoming a cartoonist (I figured I'd squeeze it in when I wasn't being an astronaut).  Because of this, I studied linework and tried to copy my favorites until I got a style down that fit me good (I also made a brief living one summer by selling my drawings to neighborhood kids...the venture collapsed within a week).  I've become a pretty fair artist since then, and I really did consider making a career out of it when I entered college, but I couldn't stand being told what to draw day after day by my teachers.  I still love looking at vintage newspaper strips and checking out what new 'toons are on TV, though the plotlines of some are just a tad too out there for my tastes.

The fourth and strongest link in my fangirliness is what sent me right over the edge.  One of the licenses that my dad's company had the rights to was DC Comics: they'd make models and magic-marker posters and rubber-stamp kits of Superman and Batman and all their Spandex buddies, and due to this, DC would occasionally send the company free comics.  These were totally random issues of whatever DC was printing the month they made the package, and one day in 1984, my dad decided to bring one of these comp packages home for us kids.  Now, keep in mind that the only comic book I'd seen before this was an Uncle Scrooge that I swiped from a friend of mine.  So here I am, a 10-year-old wannabe cartoonist with a love of overblown adventure stories, looking at this foot-high pile of reading material.  I don't know how they managed to pry the things outta my hands so I could eat dinner!  I READ EVERYTHING.  Even the stuff I probably shouldn't have been reading at age 10 like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run and the Mature Readers-labeled Vigilante.  I didn't understand half of what was going on, but dangit, I was going to learn!

And learn I did.  Any hopes my mom had of getting me to act like a normal little girl were irrevocably shattered (not that things were looking so hot before that: I supposedly announced to her around the age of 6 that I would never put on a dress again or wear my hair in pigtails).  My already-healthy reading appetite kicked into high gear when we moved to a town that had both a public library and a comic book store within walking distance...and this was in 1989, the Year of the Batman, so I went absolutely bonkers and never looked back.  I still own about 80% of what I've termed "the original stack", and many of my current favorite comics were introduced to me there.  I'll give you a breakdown of the particulars in later posts.

So that's my secret origin.  A bunch of random events that blended together to create the craziest fangirl known to the Interwebs.  Maybe not the most unique origin, but it's the only one I've got.