What’s Inside:

The whole gang is here, as Marvel readers are introduced to the band of time-misplaced Gargoyles, their human ally Elisa Maza, their enemies Xanatos and Demona, and more! This was a comic commissioned by Disney to try to expand the Gargoyles franchise beyond the television show.

Xanatos is revealed to have a continuing partnership with Demona, hinting at some devious, technological schemes to bring the Gargoyles under his submission once and for all. I don’t remember much more than that. It’s all kind of fuzzy. Guess I’ll have to reread it. Oh darn, what a chore.

Writer: Martin Pasko

Artist: Amanda Conner

Publisher: Marvel

Why I Kept This Issue:

I cannot stress enough how much I loved this show. Or the impact this show had on me as a kid. I was in late elementary/middle school when I first saw it on syndication one morning. I was impressed with those first episodes (they were dark, even brutal for a kids’ show at the time, and outrageously ambitious for a Disney cartoon), but as the show continued I found myself in a crash course in mythology, Shakespeare, sci-fi, and world cultures. I’m telling you…ambitious shit right here. There was even blood in some episodes, blood! This show treated me like a grown up!

The cartoon impacted me so much, that it actually redirected my life. Because of this show, I started reading Shakespeare to find out who the hell the Weird Sisters, Macbeth, Oberon, etc. were. I was the only kid on the playground with those goofy Shakespeare with the original text on one side and the modern translation on the other. Nerd alert. But this was a gateway; from Shakespeare, I learned that old stories were still applicable to today’s world, and I began reading even more classics.

The show’s impact has lasted well into my adulthood, since it was the foundation for my love of reading and I am now a librarian. Oh, and I pretty blatantly ripped off the Weird Sisters as the Furies in my own book. The show’s creator and guiding hand, Greg Weisman, deserves a moment of silence every time his name is spoken. Actually let’s go ahead and do that….

…

…

Okay.

I recognize that I have spoken a lot about the cartoon, and not much about this particular comic, so forgive me. As far as the comic goes, it too had a tremendous impact, which I will explain….now…

Attached Memory:

What I remember from reading this comic was loving the artwork. I was at my grandmother’s house and I began trying to duplicate the artwork using colored pencils. hanging the facsimiles about my room.

At this time of my comic collecting, I never paid much attention to the creators of the books. But I loved the artwork in this one so much that I took a gander at the front pages to see who the artist was. I then saw that the artist was a woman. Amanda Conner. (P.S. Amanda Conner deserves a moment of silence too).

When I realized that this comic was illustrated by a woman, I scoured through the rest of my collection to see who had drawn them. And I noticed something; I had been collecting for comics for about a few years or so, and every single one of them had creative teams composed of men. Every. Damn. One. Even at my young age, that bothered me. Something did not feel right about that.

And from there, I began to care about women’s issues for some reason. I started paying attention. Another trend in my life that still persists (I even minored in women’s studies in college) and shows up thematically in my writing, all because of Gargoyles.

If I’m not being clear…I would not be who and where I am today if it weren’t for Gargoyles.

Condition of My Copy: Proud to say that, after all these years, it is now autographed by the penciler Amanda Conner and cover co-artist Jimmy Palmiotti who I met at C2E2 just a couple of weeks ago. Now it’s framed and hanging on my wall, just like pictures of Gargoyles used to do when I was a kid.