Pay It Forward Week – Day 2: Regan Summers

Today’s PIFW author is none other than Regan Summers. Author of the Night Runner series and a wonderful free short on Wattpad. Regan is one of those people who makes words that sing and I have been a fan of hers since Don’t Bite the Messenger.

Once again, for every person who buys either my books or books from this week’s authors, and tells me so in the comments, I’m donating $3 (the cover price for SUMMONED CHAOS) per book to Troops First Foundation. 

Okay, enough preamble. This is her day, so take it away, Regan!

That Time My Teeth Killed the X-Men

My son is six, and he’s starting to get interested in things on a deep level. It’s not “I like this robot because it’s a robot” anymore. He’s into characterization and comparative power, worldbuilding and good versus evil, the whole nine yards. In celebration of his blossoming imagination, I took him to a comic shop. He’s into The Avengers, especially Tony Stark, and Teen Titans Go (which, frankly, I am too because it’s funny as hell). And he’s obsessed with Pokemon.

He spent about five minutes walking in circles. It’s not often that a kid goes to a place filled to the brim with objects, and knows them. Children are taken to stores and schools, to restaurants and other people’s houses, and they’re always told not to touch anything. It’s like everything in the world belongs to someone else, and most of the things are fragile or not even used (adults having mastered the art of owning lots of stuff they never have time to use), so to be in a place where he recognized most everything was magical for him.

Then he started asking questions.

What’s that?

It’s an RPG, where you pretend to be these characters and use cards and dice to determine their actions and fate.

What’re those?

Those are figurines to be painted, specifically orcs and ents.

Who is that?

That’s Rogue.

From X-Men? The girl that the ice guy made an ice rose for?

Yeah, except the movie has it wrong. The ice guy’s from a different generation. He shouldn’t be a kid when she’s a kid.

At which point one of the employees came over to edify me on the various X-Men arcs and which “true” storylines the movies got wrong. And he was right, except for how he was wrong.

I’ve never been a comic collector, but I’ve long been a comic reader. I used to snag the discards that my brother and his friends dumpster-dived for at the Mom & Pop convenience store down the street. The employees would tear off the covers, I guess to send back as returns, and dump the whole rest of the story (including adds for X-Ray specs and sea monkeys). This happened on a Wednesday in our little town, so during the summer they’d BMX down [this was the eighties, so imagine the biking scenes from The Goonies and ET (except for the flying one) – it was like that] and grab what they could find that wasn’t covered in slop. I was seven years old and like nine inches tall so I wasn’t allowed to accompany them on these expeditions, presumably for fear of being forever lost in the garbage, which would not go over well with the parents.

So the guy talked at me for a bit, but then he stopped. I’d put on my pleasant/interested face, but apparently it looked neither pleasant nor interested. So he asked me if I read comics. Affirmative. Then he asked me which titles I read and I told him that, other than Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye (which is brilliant for a hundred reasons), I basically haven’t been reading comics since around the year 2000. (He hadn’t begun until around 2002 on account of being one of those lame babies born without literacy.) He asked why and my answer was…teeth. That didn’t resonate so I explained that 2000 was the year I became ineligible for my parents’ insurance and, due to poor enamel, require copious amounts of dental work. Dental work, for those of you blessed with good enamel, is really farking expensive. It was around this time, when we were talking about my teeth and, more importantly, Shadowcat, Illyana Rasputin and the Eldritch Armor, that I realized that we weren’t there for my son. Yes, I wanted him to explore comics but, more importantly, I wanted them back. I missed them.

I’ve spent the last two decades building a successful adult life and, now that I’m getting there, I realize it’s overrated. Adulthood has a great PR team, and I hope they’re paid well for the lies they spin. But all the matching duvets and throw pillows in the world don’t hold a candle a good inking and an earnest KaBLAM.

So what’s your poison, my find feathered friends? Spiderman? Chew? Solo Storm? Does Marvel’s resurgence have you inching back to the comic shop? Or have you been staked out, refusing to leave, all these years (you lucky bastard, you)?

About the Author

Regan Summers lives in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband and alien-monkey hybrid of a child. She is a huge fan of the low profile. She likes books, bad action movies, and small plate dining.

If you’d like to support her ongoing dental work, her Night Runner series, including Don’t Bite the Messenger and Running in the Dark, is available wherever e-books are sold. The Lady is a Killer, an urban fantasy short story set in the 1920s, throwing a WWI veteran and lethal ingénue together in a feud between vampires and bootleggers, is currently free on Wattpad, HERE.

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