Shelvable Heros

When I was growing up, one of the best times of the week was Tuesday at lunch. You see, every Tuesday, there would be new comic books in the local grocery store, and I would walk (okay, run) up to it after getting done with lunch to see what might have come in this week. It worked out great for a while. My parents gave me an allowance of $3.50 every week. $.35 went into the offering plate at Sunday School, leaving me $3.15, which was perfect. Comic books at that point were one dollar each plus tax. Seeing as I was living in a place where we had 5% sales, I could support a three comic book per week habit, and that's what it was. At least until they raised prices on me by a quarter, but for the longest time, it worked out great. Somewhere in the process of graduating from high school and going to college and getting married, I slipped away from reading comics on a regular basis. This was due to the rising cost of comics coupled with the fact that my disposable income went down the tube. Well, not to say that I ever had much disposable income, but I felt more guilty about spending what disposable income I had on comics as opposed to something slightly less frivilous - like rent. There were the rare occurrances where I would pick up an issue that looked especially interesting or if there was some sort of package deal with a full story-line for one price or a graphic novel that looked good, but for the most part I left all of that behind.

Spider-Man had always been one of my favorites. I still remember the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man that I purchased. It was issue #340 where Spider-Man fights against a group of evil women called the "Femme Fatales." Was it great literature? No, but it was an interesting story, and I was hooked on the character. Spider-Man is really the character that got me hooked on comics in general.

It was also Spider-Man that brought me back into comics. I as walking through Barnes & Noble one day when I saw a huge hardcover collection of Spider-Man comics. It was titled The Ultimate Spider-Man Collection. The sucker was thick; like two-and-a-half inches thick on very nice heavy-weight paper. I paged through it really quick and immediately recognized Mark Bagley's art on the pages as he was the artist on Spider-Man when I stopped collecting. The books were being written by some guy named Brian Michael Bendis that I had never heard of, but I was willing to give him a shot, so I put the book on my Christmas list and received it that December. I was hooked again.

It's hard for me to justify dropping a few bucks just to read 22 pages (or so) a month. What isn't hard to justify, though, is using Christmas, birthday, or Father's Day money on buying the graphic novel collections of the comics. They're several issues all in one very nice package with no ads, and they fit nicely on the book shelf. I've also discovered that our library system has quite a few graphic novels in stock. I've been on a reading frenzy lately. I've read a bunch of Alan Moore's stuff (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Supreme, America's Best Comics) and Frank Miller's Sin City line along with most anything Marvel or DC that I can get my hands on. It's been fantastic. I don't think that I'll ever be at the point where I'm actually going to the comics' shop to buy two or three books a week, but for now, I'm getting my fix mostly for free through my local library and also listening to a couple of comic book-themed podcasts like Fanboy Radio, Comicology, and wordballoon. The odd thing is that one of the libraries seems to put the comic books in the non-fiction while another puts them in the SciFi section and still another puts them in the Young Adult section. Sigh. At least I can reserve the books from all over and have them sent to the library closest to me. However, some of the libraries don't exactly know how to label the comics in the sense that they have the "author" for some of the graphic novels for recent stories listed as Bob Kane who is the creator of Bat Man, but died in 1998.

So there you have it; I'm back in. I'm getting my fix as often as I can, and I'm loving every minute of it.