I blame Beau, although to be fair it all started out innocently enough. We were having lunch and we strayed onto the topic of comic books and how I love them but I fear them. I stopped collecting long ago (too expensive, too hard to keep up with), but they’ve remained a dangerous temptation — I’m a Friend of Stan L.
As we talked I was telling Beau how excited I was to see what Grant Morrison would do once he started writing for The X-Men, considering how much I went bananas for The Invisibles once I stumbled across them. Whatever. It was just a brief flare-up of nerdiness at the time, and I went back to work.
Later on in the week I saw that Beau had gotten the new issue, and I suddenly became obsessed with getting a copy for myself. I went to Forbidden Planet, but they were out of stock. I was crushed, but the fever was in me, and I was in a comic book store with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket, and all sorts of things that I had to have, like the new Authority and a kooky issue of Wonder Woman (in which she’s interviewed by Lois Lane) and some other X-men titles to tide me over. Of course, I also had to pick up the trade paperback of Earth X because I’d been coveting it for so long, and I love those Alex Ross covers so much. There was no turning back.
The next day, I finally found the X-Men book I was looking for at a much bigger place near my office, and I was so elated that I also splurged on one of the Planetary and Invisibles books I’d been curious about. Great scores all around, which left with me hours of reading. I was pleased as punch, despite feeling a little bad about going on such a bender.
I know that some think it’s really old-skool, but I’m a sucker for the whole superhero genre in comics. I know that comics are a great medium for telling all kinds of stories, but the superhero stuff still excites me in a very primal way. I’ve read them my whole life, making up characters and stories of my own and soaking in as much of the varied universes of superhero stories as I could. It’s easy to look back now and see that I have a real soft spot for a lot of stuff from my youth that wasn’t especially sophisticated, but it’s also very exciting to see that a lot of comics have grown with me. A lot of them are still just slugfests, and I often get exasperated at how bloated some of the more popular mythologies have become. Luckily, there are books like The Authority and The Invisibles and Planetary that play with the myths that nurtured me: they challenge them, contradict them, turn them inside out, and even show affection for them. It’s very po-mo now, very meta. And that’s good. There are a lot of people making comics who are up to the challenge of keeping the medium vital without losing the spark of wonder that sucked me in to begin with. Thank god for that.
