July 12, 2021 My favourite comic

 Comics are a part of pop culture that seems to be a huge piece of childhood for many people. But what are exactly the comics? Thankfully to taking American Comics class, I know the right definition! Comics are defined as a juxtaposed sequential art - ain't I sound all smart using words like this?.. I know I do -  thanks to reading an English textbook about comics. I already have pages of notes with new words I learned from it, but today's talk is not about that: today we're talking the real deal - favourite comics.

When I was a child, American comics slowly started making their way on the Russian market and my mom would buy me thin Donald Duck magazines, Though I liked them at first, I grew up fast and soon found them unsatisfactory. When I was six, I went to school and Donald Duck suddenly had become "too childish" for me: not only due to the simple plot but also because of how shoeth the comics were: mom bought me comics in the nearest post office shop and I managed to finish reading the whole issue with all quizzes and ads before we got home. So I lost interest in comics very fast and turned to read school program books and literature textbooks instead - and ended up staying in the local library until they closed and called my mom to pick me up. Luckily, I was not considered a bookworm in my class and soon all my classmates joined me in the library where we would take turns reading for each other. That was a normal after school activity and we thought it was a lot of fun. The local library had a lot of kids comics and illustrated fairytale books and we liked to read them all together. Boys brought their Spider-Man comics and I would read for them as the best in reading while they were doodling their favourite characters, and girls would turn pages of Barbie comics and bring their dolls. Sometimes we were too loud, but the librarian never kicked us out. I always like to remember that.

When I was eight, I spent my summer vacation at my grandma's in the village. In summer, the village would only have electricity in the daytime and cut the energy after six. On other days. there was no electricity at all. Luckily, my grandma is a literature teacher and her house was full of books - however, most of them were too hard for me to understand and I ended up reading grandma's newspapers - anecdotes column, to be precise. 

One day, the postman delivered a huge catalogue of yearly subscriptions for my grandma to choose her newspapers from and I, being a curious child, was interested too. And I found what I was looking for - the comics magazine!

W.I.T.C.H. is an Italian comic by Elisabetta Gnone, Alessandro Barbucci, and Barbara Canepa. This is a story about five girls who were destined to guard the borderline between two worlds to protect the Earth from the invasion. Each girl possesses the power of one or another element: earth, water, fire, air and pure energy that unites them all. The story tales its beginning with a new girl coming to the local school at Halloween time - and another girl suddenly disappears after a huge fire at the school gym.

The story is full of plot twists and serious topics such as parents divorce, treason, police interrogations, living double life and forgiveness. It's quite dark and graphic sometimes (not much of blood though), but that was the main reason why I liked it in the first place - it was something different.

My favourite character in the story was Elyon - the girl who went missing after the fire and turned out to be the princess of another dimension - the one from which the main characters were supposed to protect the Earth. She was living on Earth unaware of her status until the first breakout - after that, she was taken back home and became the villain in the story. Little did she know - she had a brother!

The brother searched for her for 13 years only to take her magical power for himself. I remember how shocking this discovery was for me as a kid and I still think that's quite a nice turn of events (in terms of the plot). The story has some politics involved too - as the plot progresses, the other dimension has a whole civil revolution against the monarch (the brother). 

To be completely honest, I have a whole 5-page long script of explanations why W.I.T.C.H is my favourite comic, but I already wrote too much, so that would be it!