Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week - beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.

When you’re working in and around the comic book industry, you see your fair share of knowing smirks. The majority of these will come to you from the so-called “real world” where a hint in regards to your occupation gives way to bemusement.

“A comic shop? How… interesting.”

While the walls between nerd culture and larger pop culture have been degrading, the results of real money erupting from some of the biggest movies of all time, the stigma remains. An interest expressed in what is seen to be a childish medium remains childish, a retreat from a world where important people go about their important business. You don’t even have to be in the business of making or selling comics to feel the effects. Almost everyone who has read comics out in the open has been treated like a reprobate leaper of some kind while those who narrow their eyes at you read dirt sheets about who might be gay or who is cheating on who, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads.

I might be angry about things like this. I am absolutely angry about things like this. It’s a direct result of more than enough back-handed comments about my chosen profession cutting far too deep. Listening to a parent explain to you in no uncertain terms that she tells her friends you “just” work at a “book store” because the full truth would be embarrassing will do that to you - especially when you’re also listening to the sounds of E!’s reality television oeuvre blaring in the background.

It hurts when your passion is questioned and belittled by those who are closest to you. As an adult, it’s a little easier to take. Years often lend a person confidence, or at the very least, afford a person the personal space to be who they want to be around the people they choose to be with. When you’re in high school, it is infinitely harder to be an individual, when forced proximity is telling you that individuality will get you hung out to dry.

In the pages of The Dumbest Idea Ever!, Jimmy Gownley recounts his early teen years spent in a small town, and how his passion for comics affected his life there. It’s a story that’s quite atypical within the world of memoir graphic novels where stories tend to be harrowing accounts of growing up with the world against you. While Gownley certainly doesn’t shy away from the medium’s stigma, his story features a lot of supportive influences, and celebrates the folks who helped him become the man he is today. Only one person in the graphic novel really pushes hard against Gownley during their interactions, and it’s the teacher who refuses to let him read comics during the free read period. Even after she agrees to let him make an impassioned presentation about the virtues of the medium to the class, and gives him a top grade, she still refuses to let him read comics in her class, because they are childish and unexceptable. It’s a scene that read so true to life, it made me squirm. Not only was I told several times that the reading material I chose to read was childish, I often get parents buying graphic novels for their kids who roll their eyes and say, “I just wish they would read a real book every now and then.” Completely ignoring the part where they are insulting the product I am selling them to my face, they are belittling something their child legitimately enjoys, implying that it is less than their ideal.

Over the course of the book, while those around Gownley encourage his attempts to make comics, they all do so with a certain level of confusion and bemusement. Nobody quite understands why Jimmy loves to read comics, or why he might want to make them, but they encourage him nonetheless, because they love him, and want to see him happy. The choice to show both sides of that coin - tremendous support mixed with a base level of confusion - is why I think this is one of the best books I’ve ever read in regards to how a kid can go from scribbling on scrap pieces of paper, to creating and publishing his own comics and graphic novels. It isn’t a book about how a guy struggled against a world set against him to triumph single-handedly. It also isn’t about a guy who was handed unconditional support and won the day through the kindness of others. It’s about someone who worked long and hard, who struggled against his ego and his talent (and perceived lack thereof), who wasn’t afraid to ask for help when he needed it and who wasn’t afraid to apologize when he screwed up. It’s a story about how comics are made: not in a vacuum of loathing, rallying against a world that hates and fears them, but in a world where hard work and passion can and does win out with the right amount of determination and humility and talent.

In more ways than one (and as Gownley himself admits) this book is The Dumbest Idea Ever. It’s the story of a teen who was too dumb to quit, and friends who were too smart to let him. It’s a book I’m going to re-read over and over when I’m feeling down about my various creative endeavours. It’s this week’s winner of our This Is Why Award. Thanks to Jimmy Gownley for being such a dummy and getting this book out into the world and into my hands. It means a lot. I hope others feel the same way.