On Comic Books and Life Lessons by Brigitte

On Comic Books and Life Lessons by Brigitte - April 2014 Scholarship Essay

6,850. That’s how many pages there currently are in a web comic called Homestuck, and I have read them all. It's about 3 am., and the cool light of my laptop is the only luminescence in my house, and I am leaving for the airport in two hours, and I have finally reached the end. I've spent the last month of my summer reading and researching the characters: sitting on the porch, by the river, on my phone, after college class, waiting anxiously in the car for the next page to load. Why read something so long? Because one character, Karkat Vantas, made me understand some things about myself.

I have understood since a young age that I am not truly from anywhere. I grew up speaking three languages, learning French-Canadian songs along with Peruvian sayings, talking about physics instead of football at dinner. I’m still foreign, removed from the normal American experience despite living here all my life. Even when I visit family in Peru, I’m referred to jokingly as 'la gringa";when I am in Canada I am la "petite espanole". I exist outside one steadfast cultural context. Karkat, leader of a group of alien teenagers, grows up even mole removed from his respective society. In a casteist society based on blood color, he must hide his mutant crimson blood because it places him outside the social order and puts him at risk of being exterminated. What good could possibly come from being intrinsically other? When he must lead, he is the only one can exist outside the class structure. He’s not an aristocratic blueblood, he’s not of the resentful lower classes, he’s just a kid. Belonging to no one group allows him to relate to everyone. In all the constant class-related tensions, he alone remains everyone’s friend. And as I realize this about him I realize this about myself— in my travels to Europe and South America and Texas I’ve found that people are people. and that there always some way to connect with them.

The morning after I finished Homestuck, I left to Costa Rica for a two week service trip. I was two people there: a clueless imported volunteer who could probably end up planting a tree roots-tip, and just another hispana- As easily as I could talk to my English- speaking teammates, I could talk to the local botanist about Condorito comic books and soap operas in Spanish. I was from nowhere. I was a living link. I was a translator both literally and figuratively, finding common humanity simply by being open and kind. Like Karkat I became a leader—and took up his role as a hero of unification. How could the narrative have a genetic anomaly embody connection, if his blood is disconnected from the normal spectrum? He realizes, and I realize, that maybe his otherness does not cause separation by blood, but leads to the unification of it. Karkat may not be real, but he’s the kind of hero that I am learning to be.