front page  ·  comicbook reviews  ·  interviews  ·  comics  ·  merchandise  ·  contact us  ·  newsfeed: rss xml

Greetings! Now that I have joined the columnist party, I can fly various thought balloons by you and share some of the aspects of the hard road I’ve taken in life — that of comicbook* reader, collector, and, now, critiquer. It hasn’t been easy and it isn’t a life I’d recommend for everyone. Only those who truly want to fight for the incalculable rewards of reading should venture forth into comicbook fandom.

It starts when you’re young. The sun is out, your friends are playing ball, yet you’re trapped in your room, lying on your stomach on the floor, reading Captain America or Dark Shadows with your legs absently kicking the floor behind you. This is just too good to stop. As you read, you talk to yourself, saying things like “That comicbook cover — it’s so creepy!” and “Look what happened — Robin can’t really die, can he?” and “Ohmigod, Mysterio miniaturized Spider-Man and trapped him in an amusement park of death! Go away, kids, I’ve got a radioactive monkey from Krypton on my back.”

When your age can be counted on two hands, so can your annual income. Thus, after you get hooked, the begging starts. “Mom, can I have 12 cents? I need to get the next Wonder Woman! Her lasso of truth turned on her!” You try negotiating: “Dad, if you give me a quarter, I can get two books, and I’ll even bring you back the change!” You realize you don’t have much leverage. Just to get you off their backs, they’ll give you some spare change for your “funny” books.

But that doesn’t solve your problem. Many years will pass before you get that first Mustang (even though it's four years old already), and neither your Radio Flyer wagon nor tricycle are allowed to cross the streets. You need transportation to the nearest grocery store, and to do that you’ll have to ride along with mom and put up with shopping or with dad and have to sit at his office. Sacrifices must be made. You can’t just jaunt off and cross Bifrost, give Heimdall a high five, and arrive in the supermarket’s automatic glass doors. You need a driver for the Batmobile.

Once you get your ride, though, many of these concerns start to turn invisible as you keep your metaphoric eyes on the imagined prize. Your mom pulls a shopping cart into the store and before she can ask you to run and get some toilet paper, you locate and attack the comicbook rack. At eight years old you don’t know what day of the week the books come in or how long their shelf life is. You do find, however, that supermarkets know very little about comicbooks. You glance at the top of the books and see the red or green spray paint that some idiot has sprayed all the ends of the comics with. Sometimes it leaks down into the page. Who would do that to a comicbook? And the books that have been there too long start to sag and bend. Why does the store have to put the books near the humidity of the freezer section? Why don’t they keep them straight? And who can stand the squeak of the rack as you spin it around? Don’t they oil this thing? You feel, in all your eight-year-oldness, wiser than the adult world that just doesn’t understand comicbooks.

After a sigh of disgust, you start looking through the books for the titles you want, wondering how many your mom will let you take, thinking of the promises you’ll have to make — to dry the dishes, to go to bed on time, or even — egads — to clean your room! If I get three, the total will still be under 50 cents, you think. But if I get two now and we go to the store again Friday, I could get two more and that would be four. Maybe I should tie my allowance to the amount of work I do… When your brain gets too fuzzy you just decide to go for it all and you grab five titles with the fewest creases and dog ears, knowing your mom will say “That’s too many; put back two,” and you’ll still have three to take home. Ya gotta outsmart them sometimes to get your way.

You meet your mom at the checkout line in the nick of time and show her your prizes. She makes you put two back. It worked! If you weren’t holding books in your hands, you’d ring them with the pleasure of your deceitful victory — just like the Jackal would. You return the two titles you didn’t want anyway and get back to the line just in time to shepherd your prizes to the checkout clerk without letting them touch the wet, grimy rubber conveyor belt. You want them bagged separately and insist on carrying them, being careful as you have to carry one of mom’s bags of nonessentials. You opt for the toilet paper and cereal bag because it’s light and, more importantly, you can slip them inside where they’ll be straight and protected between the Quisp and the Scott’s.

The ride home is excruciating. You need your fix. But you can’t read in the car. That would somehow diminish the experience. It wouldn’t be special. Plus, you get carsick. You have to take them into your room, your sanctum sanctorum, and wait until your chores are done and after dinner when you are less likely to be interrupted. Your room is your special space, the environment you’ve made, creating it as you go while you read your comicbooks. Every day an adventure and a trial — it’s a hard row to hoe, but hoe you must. And your fertile mind grows with every reading and is soon blooming with ideas. If this is a bad habit, it’s the best bad habit you could have.

As I recall those halcyon days, I know that reading comicbooks helped me expand my universe. I sympathized with characters, which led to my caring and considerate nature today. I looked up words I didn’t know, which led me to my love of language and learning. I let the stories affect me, make me variably tense, worried, angry, happy and cathartic, and this led to my love of writing, where I could try to reproduce those sensations in other people — so I could share the enjoyment of reading with them. It has been a hard road, but nothing good ever comes easy. When it comes to reading comicbooks, the rewards are well worth the effort.

*Creator of and father to superheroes galore, Stan Lee coined the term "comicbook" to distinguish the sequential art we enjoy — that is often more dramatic than comical — from "comic books" which are either books read by comics like Jerry Seinfeld or books that are humorous.