It is a simple but meaningful story, and I'd like to share it with you.
This morning I got a call from Oscar, one of the organizers of the Montreal Comic-Con, to confirm my ability to volunteer for the three days of Convention activity (Friday isn't a day of attendance, but I will be there to set up before the Saturday start). Later in the day, while running errands in the city, I swung by 1000000 Comix to talk to Alex, the other Convention organizer and one of the owners of 1000000, about what I'll be doing at the Con as a volunteer. When I got to the store it was relatively busy, so I do my usual browse the racks thing and I notice an out-of-place mid-to-late 30 year old lady dealing with a pile of singles and trades, looking perplexed, while her very young son nearby reading an issue of Marvel Knights Black Panther 2099
(I seriously didn't even know this book EXISTED until today).Seeing as the one-man-staff of the store is moderately busy elsewhere I wind up, after a brief while, heading over to see what the mess of comics splayed out in front of her was about. As it turns out she is a teacher and, during the summer, she runs a camp for at risk students (those who are most likely to drop out of school either because of family situations or because they have trouble for one reason or another keeping up with where they should be academically (reading levels etc.)), and the theme of their camp is Comic Books (at least this year and the last). They use comic books to help get these children interested in reading and to help cover various ideas, such as seeing how representations of characters differ depending on the era they were written in etc.
She had requirements she needed to meet with the material she was getting, such as needing to have black superheroes (which her son was adorably trying to help her with by handing her Black Ca
t and Spider-Man: Back in Black
trades) and needing to have differeing levels of difficulty in her material. she had a decent variety of reading levels in front of her, but the metric tonne of singles she was going through did not equal up to any one story getting told in sequence. First I helped her with the fact that she had no continuity to the books she had, which is something she herself just didn't have any awareness of before this shopping excursion (her experience with comics in the past having been Archie as a child and collected volumes of Bone
for the previous year), and this wasn't just the geek in me saying "Egad, how do you expect them to read issue 3 and then jump to 15 without the twelve issues between them?", because, as she explained it to me, the idea is that if a child reads part one of a story they are more likely to want to keep reading if the next relevant chapter is nearby and just as easily mentally digested (well, clearly those are my words, but that is the meaning she conveyed).
Following that (I really wanted to use Pursuant, but the definition just doesn't match up) I acted on the Black Hero requirement and reccomended War Machine to her, for two reasons: 1) He is bad ass and covered in guns and 2) he was in Iron Man 2
and would draw in recognition credibility from the kiddies. I scoured through the back issues and found a small 5 issue run of the classic 1990s War Machine comics, which I figured would be much more kid friendly than his newer run which, from all I have read of it (not much), is more realistic and therefore more violent. Alex wound up sort of working out a deal with her for how she could affordably bring the entire camp to the Montreal Comic-Con, and then she bought a big stack of books and headed out.
I was left feeling very satisfied and accomplished, knowing that I had just helped somone (who thanked me profusely throughout the entire event) bring both reading and comic books to children. It was very fulfilling to know that I could very well have helped to spread the love of this medium on to another generation... and I can only think of one thing that would be more satisfying than that...
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