The world of comics activism is a strange one. Take a dip on the internet, coast through the message boards and forums, and you'll meet its soldiers - passionate readers and semi-successful writers with internal dials set on "revolution", determined to bring comics to the world like pop guerrillas. Use any means necessary. Plaster the web with mores and intent. Litter the bookstores and comic shops with cheaply printed pamphlets. Carve out sigils on the literary world, the "cool" world, get everything out there and see what happens. Make them understand: comics are vital, comics are wonderful, comics are dying and we simply won't let that happen.

It feels at once hopeless and promising, to be a comics activist. It feels exciting, to walk around the streets in a "Defend Comics" T-shirt, to drop references like bombs on the unsuspecting. To dedicate yourself to something no-one else cares about.

I consider myself a comics activist. I print out PDF booklets and distribute them in coffee shops and movie theatres, bookstores and clubs. I volunteer time to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and, when I can spare the money, buy multiple copies of books like AUTOMATIC KAFKA and EGOMANIA to pass out to friends, co-workers, and occasionally the unfamiliar face passing by on the street.

'Make them understand: comics are vital, comics are wonderful, comics are dying.' If you're reading this site, chances are you or someone you know is also a comics activist. You do your best to pass the word around, you tell people about books like MAUS and KANE and ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY, strong books of literary value, books that are wonderful and unique and largely unknown.

Good for you.

Here's the thing: Why is it that nobody brings up books like SUPERMAN? FANTASTIC FOUR? NEW X-MEN? THE AVENGERS? Why is it that fellow activists shrivel up and cringe when I mention I wear a Superman T-shirt?

Yes, I wear a Superman shirt. I got it six months ago, in a noisy Hot Topic clothing store in Kansas City, tacked on a wall between Korn and Bob Marley and countless other designs that muddled into the background behind the gleaming red, yellow, and blue of the Superman shirt. I immediately bought a small for my nephew, and, mulling it over, a large for myself. Since then, I've been all over America with it.

Nashville, Tennessee. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Cleveland, Ohio. I'm in real estate, and I travel, and there will eventually come a day when my shirt and me have been in every major city in the US.

I wear it everywhere - bookstores, bars, clubs, parties, business meetings. Most of the fellow comics activists I meet look at it with disdain, a gruesome reminder of what they feel they're fighting against - the superheroism and geekism of comic books; the fact that nobody wants to believe comics are for adults, nobody wants to believe comics are cool.

'Comics activism blindly refuses to push the familiar comics.' They think no-one can take someone seriously when he's wearing a Superman shirt; that whatever he says is the deranged rant of a skewed perspective, a man who has no respect for himself, whose opinions are from here on considered null and void.

"You're hurting the cause," somebody said to me once, on a cold, drunken evening in Atlanta, Georgia. "Wearing that's not going to make anybody want to go buy a comic book."

Well, I'm sorry. But it will. It has.

I met Greg in Milwaukee, at a Barnes & Noble, in the café. He had just bought a copy of Hunter S Thompson's HELL'S ANGELS, a book I'd finished a few days earlier. Coffee was drunk and conversation was struck, and we called each other whorehoppers and pigfuckers and other greasy words.

Eventually, he mentioned my shirt. He mentioned that he used to read comics when he was younger. Like many others, though, as he got older, he grew out of them, tired of the bombast and cliché. He moved on to Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, and had given no thought whatsoever to the stack of SUPERMAN issues that lay rotting in his mother's basement.

I immediately walked him to the graphic novel section and handed him TRANSMETROPLITAN: BACK ON THE STREET. Money was spent, e-mail addresses were exchanged, and I walked out of the store with a sly grin on my face, skipping across the pavement, thinking to myself over and over again, "it worked, it worked, it worked."

'Most of my fellow comics activists look at my T-shirt with disdain.' In Austin, Texas, there was Erik, who spent his hard-earned money on KINGDOM COME, reminded of the simple beauty of the modern superhero, flashing a wild look in his eye, like he'd rediscovered a lost world. In Columbus, Ohio, Sylvia slid out of a Borders bookstore, UNCANNY X-MEN: THE DARK PHOENIX SAGA gripped in her fingers. And here, in Dallas, my new co-worker Dave leafs through a borrowed copy of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN in-between training sessions.

And every time I go home to Kansas City, and see the occasional familiar features of another activist, they usually say the same thing: "Thank god you're not wearing that fucking shirt."

The problem with all of this comics activism is that it mostly blindly refuses to push the familiar comics - the comics that bring back memories of Sunday afternoons spent in bed, gorging through a stack of THE X-MEN; issues of THE FANTASTIC FOUR hidden behind geometry books; DAREDEVIL under the covers made readable by flashlight.

Some people don't want serious comics. Some people don't want serious anything. They want action/adventures and sitcoms. They want THE AVENGERS. They want BATMAN. They want SUPERMAN. MAUS and KANE and ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY they're not; but comics they most certainly are.

Comics can be serious, literary, and important. They can also be childlike, simple, raucous, energetic, fun. One group is not more valid than the other - they're still just comics. And that's what we're trying to promote, isn't it? Comics - whatever the subjective quality, whatever the genre, whatever the "cultural importance". We're trying to get books in the hands of new readers. Does it matter what books they are?

Some people look at me in my Superman shirt and wonder what I'm thinking. Some label me a loser and walk by, never forgetting to tell me their opinion as our shoulders brush. And some are reminded of those evenings under the covers, when the world seemed bright and easy and wonderful, and all they needed to keep them there was twenty-four pages of Superman rocketing off into the sky, gleaming like a fireball, red, yellow, and blue.

John Parker lives, works, and writes in Kansas City, Missouri.

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