How it ended with me and comics
What do you do when the love grows cold? What do you do when passion congeals into apathy and you find yourself going through the motions? Is it possible that a love that burned so bright and strong can truly die? And what does that say about me if it does; am I a superficial person that I can so callously reject decades of joyful congress? Have I learned nothing from our years together?
I stopped collecting comics about twelve years ago at the age of thirty-three. One of the reasons was that the primary possessive verb associated with comics is to “collect.” Not to “read.” The comic acolyte has a priority to accumulate physical amounts of inventory - catalogued, databased, bagged and recorded – to store up these cosmic nuts as some kind of historical bulwark against a future bleak winter of famine. Except the feast keeps on bloody coming; every year more reinventions, reboots, relaunches and retards (what else do you call characters who haven’t grown up over fifty years plus?).
I know what started my fall from funnybook grace: a little painted hussy called X-Men #1 by writer Chris Claremont and artist Jim Lee in 1991, intended as a reboot of the mutant series that had so engaged me over the years with its adamantium-clad midgets and self-sacrificing telepaths. She paraded herself on the shelves of my local Forbidden Planet, flaunting no less than five – count ‘em! – five variant covers. And I knew that if I couldn’t have all of her I wouldn’t be happy; no matter that what lay between those variant covers was exactly the same in each case.
Yet when I scuttled home, avoiding the greetings of neighbors in the elevator as I gripped my carrier bag, darted into my apartment and gorged on the outcast mutants’ battle with arch-enemy Magneto in a slug-fest that took approximately (I’m working on memory here…) six and a half minutes, I felt, afterwards, less sated than… cheated. Empty. The other four copies lay waiting before me, four-color gilded like the concubines of Indus – surely deserving of their own turn at my fervent attentions! – yet I cast them aside, disgusted and ashamed, wanting these variants only to leave me alone with my guilt and ennui.
I realized, at that moment, that Marvel Comics had printed about four million copies of these variants, for a comic-buying market in which even a top-selling title numbered something around 100,000 copies (still working on memory…). So there we all were, already a tiny market shrinking even then in relation to film, TV and video games (and much smaller in 2008, but that’s the subject of another blog), coerced by smoke and mirrors into buying multiple declarations of our love and bagging them in mylar condoms, stacked vertically, their mutant sperm contained, circling patient and compliant within those plastic sleeves; waiting to be released onto the mythical egg of investment, 3.99 million copies suddenly released toward an ovoid light of speculative realization, mutant tails waggling furiously into a parallel universe bear market that vibrated just out of our reach.
Despite having spent the grand sum of $12 on a mere five funny books (and that’s changed too now: current 2008 equivalent price: $27) I felt only cheap, and took to my bed in a fever dream. When I woke up the next morning, and saw the sun creeping across my stacked acid-free cardboard boxes, mute containers of Killraven, Omega the Unknown, Destroyer Duck, I suddenly… no longer gave a shit. I was jaded.
Sure, I spent a couple more years pretending. What was I going to do? Just come out and tell her it was over? So I put on a brave face, threw my keys into the party bowl and watched different comic companies ”get it on” with each other: Batman and Spawn, vigilante cottagers embracing under the dark comfort of their giant cloaks: Superman, still chaste after all these years, cock-teasing the hard biomorphic protuberances of Aliens from a different sun; The Justice League and Avengers partying down like cross-dressing clubbers from the Limelight Club.
But it wasn’t enough. Neither were the toys: the lenticular covers shimmering like dental dams at the special section at the back of the shop; the surrogate snuff movie phone-ins that decided whether characters should live or die, with Robin beaten to death with a crowbar by the Joker as sweaty geeks in basements around the world jerked their vote buttons repeatedly.
By the time Hank Pym (aka Antman) was beating up Janet Van Dyne (aka The Wasp) I knew it was over for me. Forty years earlier she had loved him, willingly became his partner as they embarked into a strange new world ruled more by the thorax than the head; yet now she was taking out restraining orders on him and finding comfort in the arms of that life-sized vibrator, Iron Man.
It was time to break the cycle.
In October 2002 I wheeled my stacks of comic boxes to a local dealer. I opened sales negotiations by citing prices based upon my extensive database notes – supplemented by annual tracking variations in both the US Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and its UK equivalent, pointing out key total-run collections such as Crisis on Infinite Earths and limited key creator-runs such as Frank Miller’s Daredevil – yet was met with a blank stare. I was not the first to come begging to his store, desperate to trade in all those lost years for a dynamic new fiduciary recompense that would propel the seller into a new world of three-dimensions.
“I’ll give you a flat rate of twenty cents per comic, assuming there’s 200 issues per box,” he said, flatlining as he grasped a Judge Dredd standee for strength, eyes wild with hunger.
“But-“ I flustered: I had Marshall Law. Spidey’s first symbiote costume appearance. Wolverine #1. I had all the Giant Size Man Things! I had Howard Chaykin’s sexually graphic Black Kiss!
“Twenty cents. It’s a volume business.”
Even as he struggled to wedge my boxes into his already overflowing storeroom - with all the enthusiasm of a plague dweller piling desiccated corpses onto a cart - his rheumy eyes betrayed panic that he had, in fact, bid too high. Panting between exertions, he squinted under the false sun of his poly-bagged X-Men #1 five variants pinned high on the wall. They remained untouched. Chaste. Their pages never spread.
When he returned to the next box – which, I informed him, possessively, comprised a complete run of Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck – he sobbed briefly as he stacked it onto 300 more copies of X-Men #1 in back. Maybe if only he’d offered me 15 cents per comic, he could re-sell some of this ship ballast at 16 cents over the next decade and make enough to speculate on a new Catwoman movie tie-in. He’d heard that the Halle Berry reboot was going to push sales of Bat guano through the roof…
And so here I sit, wiser and sadder. Do I think of my old mistress any more?
Of course I do. We had some great times. I still find myself, as if in a trance, standing in a comic shop now and then, shuffling past other forty-somethings; but unlike them I don’t slap down fifty bucks on an hour’s worth of reading. I can no longer buy into the legend “Together Again for the First Time.” I track her, surreptitiously, through the reports on the @$$holes’ Comicspace AICN, read about her new paramours: some Michael Bendis guy, some Mike Deodata Jr. dude (silly absurd names, and believe me, I’m coming from a universe of Infantino, Trimpe, Ploog…).
So shoot me for still caring. So what if, once a month, I buy the latest issue of Hellblazer (240 issues+ and a complete run: I salvaged this, the Gil Kane Warlocks and many other key issues before turning over a Trojan Horse of Marvel Team-Ups and Captain Carrots to that poor dealer)? So I want something for my memory box, is that so wrong…?
Other times I hang out with Maggie and Hopey from Jaime Hernandez’s Locas, and wait in vain for another Joe Matt Peepshow; and it’s cool that these indie-types feel more… real. We don’t hang together to speculate on prices. When Speedy dies, we know he’s never coming back. I don’t like to takes sides, really, but I guess that’s what happens when break-ups happen, and I now realize I always felt more comfortable with the types who always knew it was gonna turn out bad…
As for her? I saw her only once more, a couple of months back. On the web. Her pimp (sorry: publisher) has digitized all those back-issues and now you can buy her cheap: a forty year run for $40. All those intimate moments since your first teenage fumble – the explosions, new worlds, mutations, big and little deaths, star births, identity changes, invasions and wars, scientific catastrophes – posted up there on your sweaty little screen for a few measly clams; a lousy buck for every year.
The only catch?
You can look, but not touch.
NOTE: This article was inspired by Tom Spurgeon’s awesome meditation 1000 Things to Like About Comics for The Comic Reporter. As he says (a sop he throws you poor souls still digging for Golden Age material in the exhausted funnybook mines): It’s nice to be reminded sometimes, isn’t it?