From 1986 until recently, I did not read any comic books. And, for the most part, I didn’t miss them.
I’d been an avid Marvel reader as a small child, at first by default. I had no easy access to other children’s fiction.
I grew up in a town with a population hovering around 1,000. For most of my childhood, we didn’t have a proper bookstore. We had to drive to the county seat to find one of those (which we began to do as I got older, every Friday night). But my reading addiction demanded that I get more than just a weekly fix. My solution? A little store – within walking distance from my house – called the news stand. I can still remember the odor of the place: a combination of pulp print and pipe tobacco.
My first trips to the news stand were in the late 70s. Teen magazines like Tiger Beat and 16 extolled the cuteness of heartthrobs like Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett, and KISS. Professional Wrestling was a Saturday morning UHF tradition (as much of a viewing obligation as Saturday night with The Waltons) and so the wrestling rags were a must-have. This was the age of Bruno Sammartino, Bob Backlund, and Tito Santana. One day, my brother and I were reading a wrestling magazine and ran across a photo of a manager named Classy Freddie Blassie, who bore a striking resemblance to our grandfather. We decided to give him a call and tell him about this grappling doppleganger. I’m sure he was amused, and I’m glad that we called him. It’s one of the few clear memories I have of him. He died when I was six.
But the highlight of the news stand was a five-foot tall, white, spinning metal rack that held comics. For fifty (later sixty, then seventy-five) cents, I could get a story that would take me away from my small town and put me smack dab into Manhattan. Maybe that’s why I loved Marvel so much. Gotham City and Metropolis were fictional locales that no child could aspire to actually visit. But Marvel comics reeked of New York – real, live New York, in all its bigness and busyness. Marvel comics helped me, at a very early age, escape my family’s hereditary curse of provincialism.
As I grew older, I found myself drawn more and more to the X-Men (and their various spin-offs: The New Mutants, X-Factor, etc.) I guess every kid who marches to the beat of a different drummer finds solace in mutants. After all, their “differentness” is what defined them as heroes. They were outcasts from society, but only because they were special in a way that no one understood.
And of all the X-men spin-offs, the one that resonated with me the most was a four-issue Firestar miniseries. I’d first encountered the Firestar character in the Saturday morning cartoon Spider Man & His Amazing Friends. Firestar got second billing as one of the “Amazing Friends” (I think the other was a guy named Iceman). It was never revealed just what made Firestar and Iceman such “Amazing Friends”. There was never an episode where they helped Spider Man move, for example, or drove him home from the airport at 3:00 a.m.
The cartoon offered – as I recall it – unimaginative fluff.
But the comic book – not unexpectedly – presented much more sophisticated fare. I identified with Firestar more than I had with any other Marvel character, before or since. It’s now a cliché for comics writers to shackle their protagonists with insecurities and obstacles. But Firestar had such obstacles. A dead mother. A down-on-his-luck dad. Then a dead grandmother. Then rejection by her father for being a “mutie freak”. Then getting used as a pawn by the Hellfire Club’s White Queen, who manipulates her – carefully orchestrating a series of events engineered to burden Firestar with false guilt and self-loathing built atop a grim foundation: the fear of her own power.
I loved Firestar when I was 12, but somehow, over the years, lost the comic books themselves. This weekend, on a whim, I went into a comics shop and bought all four back issues for about ten bucks. I re-read them, and the result was more than just nostalgia. I was moved.
It is true that the writing was, in some ways, clunky (particularly the exposition – there’s more than a little info-dumping involved). But technical gripes aside, the story itself is phenomenal. Firestar reminded me of just how sad and isolated I was as a teen, and how far I’ve come (or –in some ways – how I’m still battling some of the same demons). I decided that maybe, just maybe, I should revisit comics. New comics. The stuff being written today for grown-ups.
But it’d been almost 25 years. An entire generation. And comics have changed a lot. Am I ready to plunge back into full-fledged geekiness?
In part two (due up on Wednesday), I’ll talk some about what kept me away from comics all those years, and what I’m finding now that I’m back.
