In 2019, I was going to turn fifty and had my midlife crisis by wallowing in the comic books I loved as a kid.
I started buying comic books again. Not new comics. Hell no. I was keyed into old comics.The shit I read when I was a kid.
When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I spent all my money on comic books. I would go to the local shop on Saturdays and buy a large wedge of books and spend the next week reading them all.
I loved all of them, but would they all stand up?
That's when I had the notion. II would figure out all the comics I read for one month when I was fifteen, read them again and write about them.
I picked the comics published in July of 1985. No reason. I just picked it. I went through lists online and was able to come up with 35 comics I pretty much was sure I bought and read that month.
I don't own my old comics so I had to go about getting them again.
Then I began to write this with the plan of finishing it by October, 2019, when I turned fifty. That didn't happen. I didn't finish this until November.
When I was done with this, I worked on the structure and how I wanted it to be and was not happy. So I put it away with the idea that I would look at it in a few months and then get it out and published.
But then March 2020 happened, and the world shut down.
I forgot about this project. This was something from the before time and it was not part of my thoughts at all.
A few months ago, I recalled I wrote this and decided to see what I could do with it. I had written a very long introduction and several lengthy side essays. I cut all that and just kept the parts where I went through the old comics.
It is a love letter to being a kid who was hyper focused on one thing. It is also a chance to think about how we change. How we stay the same. What we remember and what we were wise to forget.
I am happy to share this with you. I am now 55 and still read old comics. Not as quickly as I used to. The writing in comics and my old eyes are in conflict. Ah well. I still dig it.
