By Chris Kromphardt
Staff Writer, Justice Administrator

Skottie Young lives 10 minutes away from the town in which I grew up.

Allow me to amend that: recently-named Eisner Award winner Skottie Young lives in the Illinois town that’s home to my high school’s arch rival football team. Think Friday Night Lights, only with cornfields instead of cattle ranches, and you’ve got an idea about how I view this place. It hurts me to say nice things about it.

Normally, having a comic artist living near you might not be anything to make a fuss about. But both towns are what I like to think of as suburbs of the suburbs of Chicago, small enough that the high schools drew from “feeder” junior highs — needless to say, not too often does something exciting happen.

I first found out that Young had moved nearby a few years ago on a trip back home to my local comic shop. For a while this was always just something kind of cool to me and other people back home who read comics. However, that changed when Young won the Best Penciller/Inker Eisner last Saturday for his work with writer Eric Shanower on Marvel’s string of mini-series adapting L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels. By change, I mean that once again, I was faced with explaining to people why I like comics.

In a piece I wrote last summer that got mentioned on Newsarama, they took a shot at the title of my column. “Comics still need defended?” they scoffed. While it’s probably easy to take a stance like that when you write for a big-name comics web site, in the real world it’s a little different. In my experience, people who don’t read comics generally don’t get comics. They wouldn’t get, say, why I nod my head in recognition when I read something like Brian K. Vaughan extolling how the “very pure, undiluted creative vision” of comics is part of what makes it “the best form of storytelling ever created.” Needless to say, anytime I get it in my head that I’ve got to persuade someone of the merits of comics, I’ve got my work cut out for me.

This includes my mom. When I first heard Young had won, I called home to tell her because, as a reporter for a county — I told you they were small towns — newspaper this was the kind of human-interest story I knew they like to run. Describing the Eisner as “comic’s Oscars,” I launched into how cool it was that a guy who lived nearby had won and that the paper should totally do a story. “Chris,” she told me, “that’s nice and all, but it’s 11 o’clock at night and I don’t care right now. I’m going back to bed.” Twitter keeps different hours than a reporter for a small newspaper, I guess.

We touched base again a few days later, after my mom had had a chance to pitch the idea to her editor — to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting, listening to two middle-aged women talking about comic book artists, would have been incredible — and began talking questions should Young agree to an interview. And while we talked, I realized I was again doing something I’ve always struggled with: expressing what makes comics special. Why I had gotten excited in the first place to find out that a guy who lives in the cornfield-town next to my own cornfield-town who makes his living working on the bazillionth iteration of the Oz stories had won an award.

I still can’t explain it to my satisfaction. Perhaps Stephen King was right when he wrote, “[W]ords shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.” Perhaps it’s because comics are by design more than words: they’re words accompanying pictures, inert on the page but waiting for the reader’s imagination to give them life in the mind.

All I know is, so long as I keep getting excited by even the most trivial in comics, I’m going to keep trying to explain why.

Front page photo from conventionscene.com, interior photo from Skottie Young’s official Facebook Fan Page, Ozma of Oz cover from comicrelated.com.