Answers

From a comment: I would like to understand more of the common descriptions you use with comics. CrossGen, etc.

CrossGen is a publisher, like DC (Superman, Batman) and Marvel (Spider-Man, Hulk). Other publishers I often refer to are Image (Age of Bronze, WildGuard), and Dark Horse (Usagi Yojimbo, Conan). I also generally do my "Flipping Through Previews" post by publisher. Previews is the catalog of comics, and lists all the comics due out in two months.

CrossGen is a very new company that sprang onto the scene a few years back with lots of promise. The hope among some comic book fans was that it would revitalize the form and get more people reading comic books. But CrossGen made a couple of mistakes, the first being that they used a "shared universe" format, in which all their books were linked. This made some people, myself included, wary of trying to read their books. The second had to do with financing and marketing, and I'm not sure entirely where they went wrong, but I do know that they didn't pay my friend, inker Robin Riggs, money owed to him. Along with a number of other freelancers who worked for them. That lost them a lot of goodwill in the comic book community.

Um, some other terms I use: "writer" is the person who writes the comic book scripts. A "penciller" draws the artwork in pencils, then an "inker" comes in and puts inks on the pencils to fill in details and make it ready to be reproduced. A "letterer" adds the words to the artwork, deciding where the words should fit in. And the "colorist" adds, you guessed it, color.

What 'hooked' you on the genre? Was it stories, art, or what?

Are you talking about the genre of superheroes, or the form of comic books? Comic books are not, in and of themselves, a genre. I'll try to answer both.

I got hooked on superheroes thanks to old Saturday morning cartoons. Aquaman in particular always stood out to me. The fantasy of the characters appealed to me. I've always been into escapist literature, and superheroes are one of the best around.

As for comic books... I love artwork. I've always loved seeing what people can do with drawings. But books of just plain art don't really interest me that much. Adding it text, adding in a story, puts it over the edge. In addition, we all know how to read comics. It's the thing I look forward to the most in the newspaper each day. Getting 22 pages of artwork with story instead of a tiny strip is kind of nice, if expensive.

Any more questions?