I often wonder what would have happened to me if I'd taken the relationship example of Betty/Archie/Veronica/Reggie seriously.

They tell you cleanliness is next to godliness. They being those people who write those books of guidelines explaining how you're supposed to behave. They give rules about eating candy in church and putting the toilet paper either under or over the roll.

In this case, I'm not sure they're wrong.

They're not taking it away, really. They just expect me to pay for it now. Darn. There go the free comics.

Ucomics.com went to a pay system last year, offering either all your comics in one big email or on one special webpage. They still offered the option of getting one comic for free, knowing that someone who's just getting Adam or Foxtrot or For Better or For Worse wouldn't pay for a service that was supposed to be a convenience to the people getting twenty comics a day.

I was surrounded by people who succcumbed to that so-called Yellow Fever in university. Sometimes I felt like the minority, not being obsessed with getting to Japan, or with scoring bootleg Anime and Manga in the original Japanese. I didn't take Japanese, despite having the opportunity. I didn't even try sushi until third year, despite the trendiness of sushi bars in Halifax (when I left, there were at least 7 within walking distance of the university). It wasn't until after I'd left university that I tried watching bootlegged VCDs of Asian movies, despite my friends all having seen Ringu before they'd even started talking about making The Ring.

When I was a kid, my cousins collected comics. Jeff had his bagged, boxed and stashed away, with an offer of several thousand dollars on it when the comic market took off. Steph kept hers in a cardboard box under the bed and let me read them. I liked Steph's collection better, but then she didn't have to worry so much about her books – she wasn't a collector.

It all started early one spring as exams were wrapping up. My group of university friends, together 8 months of the year, were once again facing the harsh reality of being ripped away from each other, from Saskatoon to Timbuktu. Rather than trying to send emails to everyone (there were quite a few of us), we all got livejournals and started blogging, with the promise that we wouldn't tell the people at home (or wherever we were spending the summer) what we were up to.

Some of us were more successful than others.

I once wrote a (very short-lived) column for an alternative paper. My first piece was about high-heeled shoes - mostly because I was supposed to be writing about pop culture from a female perspective. The column was good - still one of my favorite pieces of writing, actually - and the second one was all right - about how my neighborhood was like the one in the X-Files where the monster comes out to eat you if your mailbox is wrong (there's no monster - just the "Neighborhood Commitee" -eep!). But I just couldn't keep the momentum needed to keep writing girly pop culture musings biweekly.

I could not be the token female.

When I look for a comic, I'm most often attracted to the things published with girls in mind. When I was younger, it was Archie. I read so many digests and individual comics (which are still in my parents basement in a large box) that I could tell you what era a story came from based on what Betty and Veronica were wearing.

And man, did I love the pin-ups in the Betty and Veronica comics.