Just a little story I felt like sharing—

So back in the late 80s/early 90s, I used to collect baseball cards. I liked baseball and all my friends collected cards, so it was good times. We all had fun until one of the more obnoxious kids on my block tricked the kid with the learning disability into trading away his Jose Canseco rookie card for nothing by explaining that “Jo-ze” was “Ho-say’s” less-talented brother.

Anyway, I moved away from those kids when I was entering the fourth grade, around 1992. At my new school kids liked cards too, and we’d bring in our favorites to brag about at lunch. I remember accidentally destroying a Darryl Strawberry card because, surprisingly, my pocket was not enough to protect its cardboard edges. Baseball cards were still king among my friends until one day at lunch someone brought in a new kind of card. These new cards had really cool pictures on them and were super shiny and thick, with sharp metallic lettering. They were Marvel Masterpieces trading cards. These were fucking badass cards.

Fortunately for me, a few days later my dad took me out to dinner at some generic Italian restaurant, “Tony’s”, which was located right next to “Books”, the uncreatively named store that sold used books, trading cards, and comics. After dinner, we wandered in there and I tried to find some of those super cool cards I’d seen recently, but apparently they were in heavy demand at that time and they were all sold out.

With fancy cards no longer an option, I wandered around the store’s collection of comics, eventually browsing through the big rows of back issues, seeing all kinds of crazy characters peering out from their shiny plastic bags. Eventually my flipping led me to find a copy of X-Men #1. I didn’t know much about comics, but I had at least the vague sense that the X-Men were a pretty big deal in this world. Not only that, but I knew that the very first X-Men comic had to be hugely important. Even as a 10 year old, it did occur to me that the odds were not great that I had found the deal of the century (the comic was something like $3, and there were about a dozen of them available) but it still seemed to me that this was worth checking out. Even if I hadn’t discovered a pile of wildly under-priced super-rare comics, the artwork on the cover made it looked like something that would be pretty cool to own.

Of course, my X-Men #1 was the Chris Claremont/Jim Lee X-Men-as-opposed-to-Uncanny-X-Men book, but once I got it home and popped it out of its bag and board, I was instantly hooked. I read that copy a few dozen times until I could convince my parents to bring me back to “Books” so I could pick up issues 2 and 3 to fill out the story. From there, I picked up every issue of X-Men that was available, spending virtually every dollar of my allowance on comics for years and years.

As I grew older, I branched out to collect other X-books, and later grew into other Marvel books, the occasional DC book, and eventually some indie comics. Comics were my world for 5 years solid. But then high school came, the quality of my beloved X-books seemed to dip a bit, my local comic store closed, and I began to get the sense that I would never get laid if I was “the comic guy.” I recall that last point was helpfully reinforced by a cute girl I sat next to on the bus one day who proceeded to talk to her friends about how weird I was when I busted out my 3D glasses to read some 3D comic (I think it was a Valiant comic…Solar: Man of the Atom, perhaps?).

In the spring of 1997 I finally cut myself off from comics altogether, with not a little bit of self-loathing involved; while there were practical and content-related reasons for me to leave, I was also definitely trying to rid myself of the nerdy stench of comic books. But I always remembered fondly the characters and worlds I read about month after month for so long. And now that I’m an adult, I have the money to easily explore all the comics I’m interested in, and the self-confidence to read them and know that women will still want to date me anyway (at least my girlfriend doesn’t seem to think I’m any more of a dork than before), I’ve returned to the world of comics, and I’m really happy I have. I’m not exactly reading the same books (I’m checking out some of the traditional superhero stuff that I used to read, but focusing more of my attention on genres that either didn’t exist when I was younger or that I never really investigated) but it’s still the same kind of feeling. There just really is nothing like the storytelling experience of a good comic book. I’m glad to be back.