I can still picture the tiled floor of the pharmacy. I can remember the squeal as I turned the spinner rack, the dizzying number of choices. I don’t know why I selected the comic I did (it certainly didn’t have the most captivating cover) and over the years I picked up a lot of comics from there. I don’t remember each and every one, but I remember quite a few of them.
When I was seven, a comic book store opened up in my hometown. It was about a mile from my house, and I would walk there every week, I would spend hours looking through the back issue bins, trying to figure the exact perfect comic to bring home. I often made horrible choices.
Today I live in my grandparents’ old house. That pharmacy is now an abandoned storefront. The comic shop in my old hometown in now an abandoned storefront (although that’s because the owner moved to another location six years ago--it’s still my preferred comic shop). I drive by these abandoned storefronts nearly every day.
I would be lying to say that going to the comic shop each Wednesday gives me the same thrill it gave me when I was four or seven. But it still gives me a thrill. Reading comics still gives me a thrill. Talking about comics still gives me a thrill.
When I was seven years old, I would have killed for someone to talk about comics with. I was still too young to really talk to the guy who ran my local comic shop, and none of my friends really read comics. I’m sure I tried to talk about them. I wrote research papers in middle school on Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil and on Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to meet a few people in adulthood that I can get coffee with and shoot the shit about comics. I’ve been lucky that I married a woman who has either unending curiosity or unending patience when it comes to listening to me talk about comics.
When I first discovered the internet, it took me a while to find places to talk about comics. The first and probably best place I found was the Warren Ellis forum, now sadly defunct. There have a been a few others ones, usually centered around a particular creator--like Jason Aaron’s also now sadly defunct Standard Attrition, where one could rub shoulders with Brian Wood and David Lapham and for a brief few moments Peter Milligan--but in recent years, I felt a real sourness creep in. Most people these days just want to talk about what’s wrong with comics. What they would do to fix them. Usually their solutions involve some degree of magic and willful blindness. If I could sum up the standard solution in the vernacular of this column, it would read: “I wish that pharmacy with the spinner rack had never shut down.”
Comic fans are by nature a very nostalgic folk. Hell, I’m writing this from inside my grandparents’ old house, which has not been redecorated since I was a toddler. There are photos of me from thirty years ago in rooms here that are indistinguishable from photos of those rooms taken today. Only I would have changed. But with that nostalgia comes a fear that maybe nothing will ever be as good as those things we are nostalgic about. Will I ever feel as nostalgic about Amazing Spider-man 662 as I do about Amazing Spider-man 243?
In his book “Reading Comics”, Douglas Wolk writes about we continue to seek out comics in an attempt to capture the thrill they gave us when we were younger. He also suggests that to get the same thrill from them means a significant lack of personal growth and development. I don’t know if I agree, but I also don’t know if I’m being defensive. Like I said, I can’t say they give me the same thrill, but I still love them so.
The past few months I’ve been disheartened when, usually excited about a book I’ve just read, or about an announcement I’ve seen online, I head over to a comics message board to see if other people are excited too. And I typically encounter something on the scale from ‘meh’ to ‘this rapes my childhood.’
There’s a negativity that seems to have crept into comics. There seems to be nearly daily articles written about the imminent demise of the comics industry. There seems to be nearly hourly exaltations of the general shittiness of today’s comics. And everybody seems to have their idea of the pinnacle of comics, usually coinciding with when they were ten-fifteen years old, and their own idea of how we fell from that summit of greatness.
But I believe, by and large, that the best period of comics is Wednesday. It’s the books that are going to come out tomorrow, and while many of them might ultimately disappoint me, for today, the comics of tomorrow are the greatest comics ever. I have to believe that. The day I don’t believe that, at least in some small way, that’s the day I probably start to quit reading comics. Tomorrow night I might be disappointed by my weekly stack, but tonight, I’m an optimist.
That’s what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the things about comics that get me excited, that remind me why I love the medium so much.
I want to talk about great comics. I want to talk about what makes them great.
I want to talk about not-so-great comics, comics that are slightly embarrassing to read, and I want to talk about why I still inexplicably love them. (I’m looking at you Evolutionary War Summer Crossover)
I don’t want to add any negativity, any snark, to an internet landscape that is as overloaded with the stuff as my comic shop is with polybagged copies Adventures of Superman 500.
I will never get to spin that spinner rack in the Jackson Square Pharmacy again. I’ll never get to ride my bike to R&R Comics in Whitman Center again.
But I wake up every Wednesday morning looking for that new thrill. And I want to tell you about what I find.
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