We live in a society that worships worthless
objects, and that assigns value to us as human beings based on what we
have and what we can buy, rather than who we are. We are
constantly bombarded by an advertising-driven media who forces
wasteful, unnecessary, destructive, disposable products on us,
promising a better life if we just keep spending money on things that
we don’t really need.
I fight this process, and try to consume as little as I can, especially
when it comes to buying things that aren’t re-usable.
But somehow, I got the collecting gene.
The packrat gene.
The got-to-have-it and got-to-keep-it gene.
It could be worse: my tastes don't gravitate towards high-dollar items
like fancy cars or designer clothes, and I don't desire to live in a
larger home than I really need to. But it is the little things
that kill ya'.
As a very little kid in 1977, I saw the back of an action figure
package: it said “Collect them all!”
I did.
At the time, there were only twelve to collect, but by the time I
pulled the plug in 2002 (there was also a haitus between 1985 and
1993), I had hundreds, and there was no possible hope
of ever “collecting them all”. It would be like a junkie crack
whore trying to finish up all of the heroin, just so she could
finally quit once and for all.
There is always more, and as long as there is demand, there will be a
supply. There is no end to it.
I also became a comic book collector in 1977. Before that, I had
read some comics now and then (what kid doesn’t), but when I was very
young, I never realized or cared that there might be continuity from
issue to issue, that these adventures of caped crusaders fighting crime
in their underwear could become fetish objects that might pull someone
in, and make them come back for another fix month after month.
No, as a little kid, I had indifferently browsed the occasional one-off
superhero adventure, listlessly picking up a colorful bit of pulp from
a small pile that had accumulated without much interest or effort on my
part. Just like any kid. Comics just seem to have always
been around, in small quantities, and were not highly regarded nor
coveted.
This was about to change.
For my birthday in 1977, my aunt gave me a t-shirt with an iron-on
photo image from a science fiction movie on it. Packed along with
the shirt was a comic book adaptation of that same film. The
problem was that the enclosed comic book only told the end of the
movie’s story. I noted the number six on the cover. I knew
that numbers one through five must be out there somewhere, and that,
I’d need to
“collect them all” if I wanted to get the whole story.
I did.
And then some.
Thirty years later, I stopped.
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After that fateful birthday, I made my dad take me to the drugstore to
find issues one through five. I was a season too late. None
of them
were around... but issue number seven was. Across the top of the
cover it
said:
“At last! Beyond the movie! Beyond the galaxy!”. I looked
inside:
familiar characters in unfamiliar situations. The banner on the
cover
had not lied. I didn’t have the cultural reference points at the
time
to realize it, but the space heroes had been recast in a scenario aping
the famous Japanese film
The Seven Samurai (later remade in
America as
The Magnificent Seven). There was no possible
way I
could fail to
posses this comic book. In short order I discovered the concept
of a
monthly issue that would sit on the stands for four scant weeks, and
then be gone forever. Snooze or lose, grab it while you
can. The wait
for issue eight was unbearable.
But there was still the small problem of issues one through five.
Fortunately, this was the late 1970s, and a new phenomenon had just
been born: the comic book store.
Fortune had shined on me, for by early 1978, a
comic book store had
opened not too far from my parents’ house, and was in fact just around
the corner from where I eventually went to high school. This
store was
run by a hippie guy, his brother, and a friend of theirs. They
all had
long hair and beards. The main guy was kind of a dick who was
aloof
and annoyed whenever my friends and I came in to spend our money
(comics were “still only 35 cents!” - three for a buck), but one
of the
other guys was nice and seemed amused by me and my little nerdy pals.
Well, I will keep you in suspense no longer: thanks to the comic book
store, I got issues one through five. If fact, I kept on top of
things
fairly well: almost a decade later, when the final issue - number 107 -
eventually came
out (a year after I graduated from that high school around the corner
from the shop), I had them all neatly filed in what comic fans call a
longbox.
This was hardly the end of it all, because in the meantime, I got
hooked on a few other titles that had not been so polite as to fold
just as I was reaching adulthood. Thus the trips to comic shops
continued well after my space saga ended. I never got into the
mainstream superheroes: Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The Hulk, the
Fantastic Four and their ilk never interested me much. True
to my
roots, I liked the sci-fi comics for the most part, but the one
superhero comic I did get into was X-men.
X-men, in the early 1980s, was a groundbreaking title in
that it was
written and drawn by two rather skilled gentlemen who tried their best
to elevate the stories from kiddie fodder to something somewhat more
adult. They introduced strong female characters as well as heroes
and
villains from all possible races, ethnic backgrounds, and
religions.
No matter who you were, there was an X-person to root for. The
book
paved the way for the graphic novel explosion that came later, hatching
the idea that comics could tell complex stories meant for adults.
Young adults maybe, but adults nonetheless.
This was a springboard to more interesting things.
As I became an adult myself, I left most of the mainstream comics
behind, as I realized that there was nothing that had to be
intrinsically childish about a the medium of comics.
No laws exist decreeing that tales told in the style of comics must
exclusively concern adolescent male power fantasies starring men in
tights. Comics can tell any type of story, at all. Why not
tell (or
read) stories that are free of improbable heroes that no one can truly
relate to, and explore things that are closer to the real world, more
meaningful, and more rewarding to have spent time with? Why not
read (or make) comics outside of a corporate structure, where people
can tell stories with evolving characters, rather than with
static properties?
Why not indeed.
I fell into a newly expanding world of comics about punk rock girls
living in Los Angeles, or about Gen-X slackers living in Seattle, or
about people whose lives had been touched by anthropomorphic
manifestations of the concepts of death and dreaming. I
discovered
literate, insightful artists from Europe telling decidedly adult
stories (sex, violence, metaphysics) in the pages of a magazine that
reprinted these stories in English.
Even with this grown-up perspecitve on comics, the tug of nostalgia
became unbearable: deep into the 1990s, a new company began publishing
new comics based on that science fiction movie that had started it all
for me. The 107 issues that the old company had published were
soon
eclipsed by the new company, who published several spin off titles and
whose works soon filled two or three more longboxes. This same
company
also began producing a quasi-superhero comic that I actually was
impressed enough with to start reading (if an atmospherically drawn
demon who investigates supernatural occurrences for the United States
government can be called a superhero). These comics balanced the
indepenant titles nicely, and the 1990s were just as good a time to
read comics as the 1980s had been.
But something began to happen after the millennium.
It all ran out of steam.
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The sci fi comics drifted into ever more banal, repetitive, and shallow
territory.
The indie comics artists and writers of the 1990s all left comics to
make films or to write novels or to go earn a real living somewhere.
The European comics became trite and too obsessed with the sex and
violence without maintaining the interesting, fantastic, thought
provoking tales behind the glamour and gore.
And...
Comics were now three bucks a pop on the average.
Three bucks!
What happened to three for a buck?
In late 2007, I realized that I had been buying every published issue
of that certain science fiction title (and related spin-offs) for
thirty years.
Thirty years!
The grand total of all of these comics
accumulated over three decades comes to about twelve longboxes full of
comics. All right, that’s only
.4
box per year, but it is still a lot of comic books. Add a solid
shelf
of graphic novels and another longbox worth of comics that I had weeded
out sometime in the middle 1990s (and have never gotten around to
selling), and that is a lot of comic books.
The majority of them were read once; I’d say that about half were read
twice and maybe 10% have been revisited with some regularity.
One more grim aside: I am nearing the halfway point in my life.
Statistically speaking, I am unlikely to live much past 80, if that
long, so the halfway point is depressingly close.
If I begin re-reading all of these comics at the rate I bought them, I
will be on Medicare well before I finish. I have less time to
read
comics
now than ever before - and there are other things that I’d frankly
rather be reading most of the time - so it can reasonably be estimated
that I might never get around to reading most of the comics I own ever
again.
I never bought comics that were necessarily destined to be valuable
(some of mine happen to be, but many are literally worthless). I
bought ones I
wanted to read. I kept them all carefully bagged and boarded,
mint
condition, just because it felt right to do so, but as for resale,
well, I don’t think I could get back what I paid for a lot of them,
mint condition or otherwise. So there is no real investment here.
There is just my own personal investment in a consumerist society that
has had me hooked on next month’s promise of adventure for most of my
life to date.
When I was young, it seemed like accumulating more and more was just a
fine thing to do.
But now... what are these objects for?
Why obtain more?
How many do I need?
When have I filled up my quota, and reached a point where having more
things is a less a boon than a burden?
And let’s ask that last question again, not in the context of a comic
book collection, but in general.
One thing that our consumerist culture never teaches us to say is: “I
have enough. I don’t need any more”. I broadened my
scope:
DVDs,
books, household art objects... I have enough. I don’t need any
more.
I have reached my limit, and then some.
There is nothing more I need to buy (save food and such).
So around my birthday in 2007, I pulled the plug on the comics.
I let a few titles linger on until March of 2008, to finish up some
ongoing storylines, and then I told the guys at Chicago Comics - who
had provided my regular titles every month since 1993 - to end it.
And now: I will start over, reading comics occasionally, perhaps once
or twice a month on the average, digging back into the 1970s, 1980s,
1990s, and 2000s. Which ones will still entertain me, make me
dream of
impossible things, dazzle me with artistic prowess, or transport me
back
to youth? Which ones will I find to be worthless garbage, a relic
from
a time of less discriminate tastes?
Hopefully, I will be able to tell you this in 2037, perhaps as I
prepare to die.
Stick around, suck up to me enough, and you may stand to inherit twelve
longboxes of comics, collected from 1977 to 2007. |
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| "Tiki Bar Review Pages",
"Tiki Road
Trip", "Tydirium Multimedia", "Left
Orbit Temple", "Chester Century", "Big Stone Head", "TiPSY
Factor", "Johnny Clash",
"Tiki TV", "Cocktail Snob", and "Blue Harvest Magazine" are
trademarks of
James A. Teitelbaum. |