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This week’s cover story, “Ka-Pow!,” is an illustrated panel comic, telling the origin story of Books With Pictures, the candy-colored comic book shop that took over for Longfellow’s in 2016.
Illustrated by Seaerra Miller, a former employee, this week’s big story tells the heroic tale of Katie Pryde, whose award-winning, pandemic-surviving shop, Books With Pictures, has created a space for all comic book lovers, not just those enthralled by the antics of caped crusaders. But today I’m talking shop with Miller, who in addition to writing many of her own books, illustrated this week’s cover and the 12-panel comic inside written by Bennett Campbell Ferguson.
Google me, it’s canon, I love comic books, this is so relevant to my interest I could melt. As an adult, I am a comics nerd. I have a very robust collection of both hardcover graphic novels and straight-up comic books, but when I was young, like many girls, I was repelled by superhero storylines because they featured crazily oversexualized women with only, like, nipple armor and an iron G-string to protect them. Even boss-ass superheroines would be in boobs-out jumpsuits that showed their ass cracks. Fucking gross.
When I was 21, I was hiking around Amsterdam and wandered into what I thought was an art gallery, but was actually a comic book shop. I picked up a copy of Jessica Abels’ Artbabe #1. That was my first comic. It was just a bunch of stories about, well, an art babe. I was hooked. I was seen, I felt like, whoa, this is not illustrated horny boy fantasy, this is the marriage of my two favorite things in the whole world. Stories and art.
I may have missed a lot of years of collecting, but I’ve been nerding out ever since, and I’m gonna nerd out real hard with Seaerra Miller.