Parenting & Family Quote by Rick Moody

A novelist confessing love for comic books is a small act of cultural sabotage, especially coming from Rick Moody, a writer associated with high-literary cool and neurotic precision. The line is disarmingly plain, almost aggressively unstyled: no metaphor, no garnish, just a child-to-adult continuity claim. That simplicity is the point. It refuses the posture that serious literature requires a public divorce from “kid stuff,” and it frames taste not as a ladder you climb but a tether you keep.

The intent reads like permission-making. By anchoring the affection “as a kid,” Moody signals authenticity over trend-chasing; he’s not adopting comics as the fashionable alternative canon, he’s admitting they were formative. Subtext: the imagination that built his adult sentences was trained on panels, pacing, and visual rhythm. Comic books aren’t merely entertainment here; they’re an origin story for narrative appetite, a way of saying craft begins in obsession before it becomes credentialed.

Context matters because comics have spent decades oscillating between stigma and prestige. For much of Moody’s childhood, they were treated as disposable, even suspect; by the time he’s speaking as an established novelist, they’ve become museum-worthy and Hollywood-fundable. The quote bridges those eras, implying that cultural legitimacy is often just a delayed recognition of what readers already knew privately. Moody’s admission lands as both nostalgia and critique: if we only respect an art form once adults sanctify it, we’re confessing our own insecurity, not judging its worth.