The Comics Connection

I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't excited about superheroes.

I think it started with a giant stack of comic books from the '80s that my older brothers had in our play area in the basement. I'm sure I could only look at the pictures, but they were really cool, dynamic pictures. I remember asking my middle brother Mark about some of the characters and their stories.



Besides Nightcrawler (who was Mark's, and therefore my, favorite of the X-Men), Alpha Flight is the only comic book I can specifically remember asking about. I don't think I was very interested in a lot of the team members in general. My focus was mostly on Puck, because he was short and small and still a super-badass. I identified with him cuz I was a runt myself, so he showed me that size doesn't matter, at least to some extent. I also remember thinking that Sasquatch was cool and Wolverine was scary. Such are the memories of an approximately 4- or 5-year old child...

But then I must have graduated to animated heroes, such as He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Thundercats. My afternoons belonged to them. Hard. If my mom would schedule something (I remember one specific time it was a haircut) during my cartoon block in the afternoon, I would pout and be grumpy and mad (like you do when you're a kid) throughout the entirety of that afternoon. It may be one reason I don't get much joy out of getting a haircut to this day.

Then there are the memories of my brothers making me a Kid Flash costume that I wore until it fell apart (about 45 minutes, probably). The costume, made entirely from yellow and orange construction paper and Scotch tape, consisted of a mask with lightning bolts (that didn't like to stay attached) near the ears, another lightning bolt on my chest, some gauntlet-type things and some spat-like shoe coverings. It couldn't have taken a 6-year-old and a 14- and 15- year old more than half an hour to make it. (Although Jeff and I weren't well-known for our abilities with scissors, so Mark may have carried the team on this project...) Regardless, I was totally excited once I was all decked out. I was running around and showing Mom...and running some more. I probably even claimed I had super powers that didn't even belong to Kid Flash, but I was having fun.



A few years later, in fifth grade, a friend of my brothers' called me Slosh, and the nickname stuck. Soon Mark and Jeff started calling me Sloshman. That evolved into the goofy pseudo-superhero Super Sloshman, who, when doodled on my notebooks, looked mysteriously like me. He was even featured in a couple of creative assignments for class. But he really sprung to life when I told Mom I wanted to be Super Sloshman for Halloween that year.

That's right. I'm that kid.

She made me a costume. It was awesome. There are pictures...but I don't have a scanner yet... Maybe a future post will contain some photos of these humorously embarrassing memories...

My next big superhero experience came my freshman year of high school. I chose to do a sketch of Nightcrawler on special black paper that you scratch off and leave a negative of the image you're sketching. For source material I hopped on my bike and darted to the Valu Food up the street from my house and grabbed an X-Men comic with a totally sweet frame of Kurt with a sword on his back. Unbeknowsnt to me, it just so happened that this particular comic, which I read with great interest, was a part of a huge storyline going on in the Marvel U at the time. That storyline was the Age of Apocalypse. When I mentioned this to my friend Tom, whom I had NO idea was into comics, he said I could borrow the series from him.



I read the SHIT out of that series. Age of Apocalypse was the coolest thing I'd ever read in my short, relatively comics-free life. I wanted to get into comics at that point, but that venture would have been severely underfunded. I didn't really have the cashflow to support that hobby/habit. I also kind felt overwhelmed by the amount of backstory that I didin't know for all of the characters. So I just let it go after I read the last of the Age of Apocalypse books from Tom.

Ever since then, I've had a desire to get into comics, but I just never did.

Then, after college, I picked up Book One of X-Men: The Essentials. It's a series of paperbacks that compiles years of the original storylines from the 60s into one big ol' black and white issue. I gobbled this up and went back for four more issues, which is an assload of old comics. I finally felt like I was "into comics" for a little while. Then I hit (what was then) the end of the series and I didn't go get into any of the current storylines.



It must've been less than a year after I bought the first of the Essentials books that I was hired full-time at the station. This meant that I met and got to know the Internet's Joe Fourhman. He is a big fan of comics, and has been for quite some time. He favors the DC books (a fave of his is Jonah Hex), but also loyally follows some Marvel titles as well. Little did I know, I had finally found my guru; the One who would get me into comics.



Some time after The Hire (TM) I got into the Full Metal Alchemist anime pretty hardcore, thanks to [adult swim]. This, coupled with my burgeoning desire to get into comics, led me to start consuming the FMA manga (Japanese graphic novels).



They're still being translated and released in the U.S., so new issues only come out every other month.It was my first taste of the comic book-like feeling of anticipation and yearning for the next issue each month. I imagine the feeling is like a combination of:

-the feeling a thrill junkie gets when he lands safely on the ground after a base jump
-the feeling an addict has after he's just had the last bump in his stash
-the feeling you got at the end of watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time

My longtime friend Molyneaux has been a comics guy for a while, but he digs mostly the wierd/goth/horror comics like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and stuff like that. Stuff that, although I thought they were interesting, I also knew they weren't my cup of tea. But when Molyneaux moved to Philadelphia for about a year, he got into Marvel comics. I think this was around the time Marvel Zombies came out, and Civil War. This raised the interest level for me, also, because he was talking about current stuff and I wanted to be in on it cuz it sounded like cool shit!



Under the guidance of these two experts (read: geeks), I slowly started to inch closer to the Dark Side. I read Molyneaux's copy of The Dark Knight Returns, which kicked ass. And it was from one of them that I borrowed a copy of The Watchmen and read it cover to cover with great enthusiasm. If you've never read it, I have my own copy now...you can totally borrow it.



Then came Free Comic Book Day, 2007. I went and grabbed up a couple of free books and I bought Book One of Frank Miller's Sin City Series. I admit that I was partially inspired to read these because I really enjoyed the movie. Also because I heard that Miller is a genius storyteller and artist. I heard right. The story's excellent and the artwork is amazing. So I'm slowly working my way through that series now. Highly recommended.



Then came Wizard World Comics Convention. I wanted to buy the Civil War trade paperback while I was there, but I didn't because it was balls-expensive. Instead, I bought it a while later at my local comics shop: Comic Store West, along with a few other possibly addictive series.

At some point between Wizard Con and this trip to the comic store, I had a conversation with Joe about some of the books he reads. One of them, Green Lantern Corps, had recently gone through a reboot of sorts and was in the early stages of starting back up. It was a good time to get into it, seeing as how there was a trade out of the "Recharge" and the first six books after it, and they were launching into a major new storyline very soon. That made it easy enough to get hooked.



I smelled blood in the water.

Joe let me read Sinestro Corps #1. When I was done, I was intrigued and full of questions. He proceeded to lay some science on me about the history of the Green Lantern (and the Corps), and the Yellow Imperfection and Parallax stuff, which led into the Hal destroys the Corps stuff (I guess that's the same thing, actually, eh?), which led into Recharge.

So, later I was talking to Mark while all of this was going on. We were talking about cool T-shirts he'd seen at Target or Kohl's and he said something about wanting a Green Lantern tee. I said I thought that was weird because I don't remember him liking Green Lantern back in the day. Then that led met to tell him about the "Space Cops" premise of GLC and the Recharge thing. He was all like, "dude...now's the time!" or some such shit. He said he might even be down with reading something like that, too.

With this encouragement from the source of my comics desires, I was off to the comic store; a man on a mission. I even met up with Joe there and made some key purchases. I got the GLC Recharge trade and book 1 of the Sinestro Corps (the major series they were launching into shortly after Recharge).



Joe filled in the story gaps by loaning me a stack of GLC and SC stuff, out of the kindness of his heart. I couldn't find all of the back issues of GLC that happened between the Recharge Trade and Sinestro Corps #1. I'm the kind of guy who wants to have every detail before moving on in a story, and I really didn't want to wait until October for the trade of these elusive GLC issues to come out so I could then get into Sinestro Corps. So, he lent me a big ol' stack of 'em, along with the pertinent Green Lantern issues. I consumed them in a weekend. It was sweet and sad...all at the same time.

At some point I said to Joe, "I guess I'm a comic book geek now," to which he responded, "You're not serious until you have them pulling and holding issues for you behind the counter on a weekly basis." I haven't reached that point yet, but if I get into enough storylines and books that would necessitate this step, rest assured, True Believer...I will go there.

I'm finally in...