My family hosted a Spanish exchange student for a week in the fall of 1987, on behalf of our high school's Spanish department and my sister, who was a junior that year. I don't remember the exchange student's name, but she was 16, from Barcelona, and extremely cute. Also, her accent was amazing. Her grasp of the English language was limited, of course, and I couldn't yet speak a word of Spanish (though that would be my foreign language of choice when I began studying it the following year), so we didn't really talk to each other. Plus, I was only a freshman (which, when you're that young, means I might as well have been a toddler as far as she was concerned).However, on the second or third afternoon of her stay with us, my sister told me that the exchange student (I wish I could remember her name!) liked to read English-language comic books to help her learn the language, and did I have any that she could borrow?
I remember perceiving this request as a golden opportunity. An opportunity for what, though, I wasn't quite sure. To impress her? To start a conversation? An international love affair? Ultimately, being a shy kid, I simply hoped for the first possibility and gave my sister a handful of comics to lend to her new Spanish friend.
I don't remember all of the comics I gave to her to read,1 but I vividly recall that The Punisher issue 4 (which had just been published) was one of them. I suppose, at the age of 14, I believed that the Punisher was the kind of character that a more grown-up kid would like, and would thus prove to the exchange student how mature I was.
[At this juncture, please feel free to roll your eyes and/or make a sympathetic pity face for my 14-year-old self's benefit.]
It goes without saying that an assault-rifle-toting paramilitary vigilante with a giant skull painted on his chest is not likely to appeal to a 16-year-old girl from Barcelona (or from anywhere, really). And rather than revealing my "true nature" as a mature young man (or maybe "cool" is what I was going for, whatever that ill-defined quality means to a 14-year-old), this issue more likely gave her the impression that I was a weird little creep with a gun fetish who regularly shoplifted copies of Soldier of Fortune magazine from the drugstore and played cowboys and indians with his friends.2 Did I understand girls at all when I was 14? No, clearly, I did not.
Regardless, the exchange student was mute on her appraisal of the comics I lent to her. I never heard what she thought about them; they were returned to me, without comment except for a beautifully accented "Thank you," at the end of her stay with us. Before she left she gave me a yellow 1992 Barcelona Olympics T-shirt,3 which I loved and wore at least once a week for years until it disappeared--not long before the Olympics actually took place in Barcelona in '92, ironically enough.4
This was the first and only time I'd give comic books to a girl to read--until seven years later, when I was a senior in college and my girlfriend read my copy of Alan Moore's Watchmen to prepare herself for reading my senior honors thesis (on Hegelian notions of identity explored in the characters of Rorschach and Doctor Manhattan, among others).5 But that's a story for another post.
Pointless Footnotes
1 In the fall of 1987 I was regularly reading G.I. Joe, X-Factor, The 'Nam, Daredevil, The Silver Surfer, and The Punisher, so it would have been some combination of those--but mostly Daredevil and X-Factor, I'm guessing.
2 For the record, I neither was nor did any of these things.
3 The International Olympic Committee had selected Barcelona as the host of the '92 Olympics in the fall of 1986.
4 Another clothing-related detail I recall: While she was here she bought a bunch of Levi's jeans to give to her friends back home because, apparently, Levi's were really expensive in Europe in the '80s.
5 See particularly Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1976) and Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
