Turning the page: Tales of what draws people to Chicago helps me connect with the city

When I asked Selene Gill if she felt a sense of home at AlleyCat Comics, the comic book shop she co-owns with her husband on the Far North Side, she told me she’d made something more.

“To me, this place is a home base. It’s not just a home,” she told me. “I have tried really hard to cultivate a sense of belonging to anybody who comes in here.”

Gill, 42, who describes herself as “an agent of chaos” when it comes to Midwestern goodbyes, betrayed no sense that I was unwelcome when I stopped in her store one Thursday morning this fall.

Instead, I sat beside her at the register, and she told me stories while she rang her customers up. How she’d lived in New York City for five years, right after 9/11. How a near-pristine copy of Sensation Comics No. 1 — one of the first comics to feature Wonder Woman — helped pay for the shop. And why so many young people seem to be coming to Chicago.

“I like this city because I feel like everybody is coming here to escape something, and it’s going to be better,” she said. “There’s something about Chicago that gives people hope. … Maybe it’s the energy of the city being burned down to the ground and rising again like a phoenix in the Great Fire.”

I’ve been thinking about home and what it means lately. I’ve lived in Chicago for a year, amid so much of what’s great, ordinary and bewildering about life here. I’ve felt unmoored at times, I admit, far away from everything I knew back East, cobbling together a new sense of myself. Approaching, I like to think, a soulful sort of “This is where I’m from,” beyond the mere “This is where I am.”

It’ll be some time before I get all the way there, though my wife assures me it’ll be sooner than I expect. For now, I feel moments of vicarious connection when I hear people talk about the city’s lore or see the Hancock Building looming over Lake Michigan, whether in real life, on TV — or even in a comic book.

“My friends have teased me about this because I set almost all of my writing in Chicago,” author Eve L. Ewing told me in an email. “I suppose my theory of life here is that Chicago is both utterly unique and remarkably universal. What I mean by that is that there is so much about the texture of our lives that feels magic, on the scale of the epic.”

I wrote to Ewing, a public scholar and associate professor at the University of Chicago, since the comic she’s writing, “Exceptional X-Men,” is set in Chicago. It stars one Kitty Pryde, a mutant superhero who, adrift after fighting anti-mutant mad scientists, settles down as a bartender on the South Side.

A refuge

I won’t bore you with too many of the details, especially if cape comics aren’t your idea of a good time. But for me, an avid reader of the funny books, this one series seemed to be screaming out to me from the first issue.

Here was Pryde, newly arrived like one of Gill’s customers, escaping something awful and hoping for the best. And throughout the book — drawn so elegantly by artist Carmen Carnero — I see her slinging mimosas in Bridgeport, going out on a date in Bucktown and eventually protecting the kinds of young people I see walking around my neighborhood.

In these characters, all just living their lives, I see a version of myself that is steeped in Chicago and loving it dearly.

“They’re all fiercely proud of their little corner of the world — not just the city, but the neighborhoods they’re from,” Ewing said of the characters she created for the series, all Chicago kids to the core. “For them, home is a grounding force. They’re figuring out what it means to mutants, but they know what it means to be Chicagoans — work ethic, family, community, resilience, creativity, collaboration, good food. The essentials.”

Chicago is so many things, but I’ve learned it’s a refuge. People are coming here to find a sense of home where maybe they couldn’t find it elsewhere. And I’m reminded that I’m extraordinarily fortunate to learn from people like them, at the real-world comic book shop down the street and even in the fiction I read in my spare time.

“We’re a beacon for migrants and trans kids, queer kids. …They feel safe here,” Gill said.

After I turned off my recorder, I bought a comic. After Gill rang me, I looked at my watch and smiled.

I’d stayed too long. But it wasn’t the worst problem to have.

Kwame Opam is deputy managing editor for news at the Sun-Times and was previously the strategy and operations deputy for the breaking news teams at The New York Times.

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