I ♥ Kelly Sue Deconnick ♥s Comics

Kelly Sue Deconnick explains why she ♥s comics over at Newsarama, and it's can't miss.

Her thesis is a timely one: The comics industry is not comics.

And the advice she offers would be equally applicable to frustrated writers, artists, fans, and human beings -- anybody who sometimes finds themselves alienated from the things they love by the imperfect ways they manifest in world:

It’s been a couple of decades since I was in college (Eep), so this might not be the fashion anymore, but back in the dark ages studio courses in fine arts colleges often started out with a five to ten minute period of creative visualization. One of the most effective practices for me was to visualize a secret hiding place. For some of my earthier studio-mates a hole beneath a tree covered with a mossy boulder would do, but I’ve always been more security minded. For me it was an ancient two-ton safe, something tucked away in an old house on a tall hill, disguised in the classic mode by a painting. (I won’t tell you which one, lest you go stumbling around my imagination and uncover all four of my secrets.) Once we had established our secret hiding places, we would take all our concerns, gripes, deadlines, money issues, mother issues, whatever we had and manifest them physically somehow. For me, they were always fat manila envelopes. I’d bundle them and stretch to put them deep inside the cool and musty safe. My safe had a key rather than a combination–I didn’t want to risk forgetting–and I’d tuck that key in my pocket and walk away, secure in the knowledge that when I was ready to deal with them, all my worries and insecurities would be there for me untouched, and it was okay to get on with the work at hand.

So this right here? This is the envelope into which I’m tucking all my gripes, legitimate and petty, this is where I’m putting the comics industry and all my insecurities about what you’ll think of me as a person for expressing some opinions about which you may not agree. I’m tucking the comics business into my safe and getting on with the business of loving comics.