Hey Kids...Comics!...and my life with them!

In one way or another, comics has been part of my life since I was very young. In a childhood that I can remember very little of (probably for the best), I can distinctly remember going to the grocery every week with my mother and was allowed to pick one (or more if I was really good) of the comics that were stuffed in that squeaky red rack (I can still remember the uneven noise it made as I turned it). Sometimes Marvel but more often than not a DC before either of those names had any meaning for me. I can remember having my aunt make clothes for my MEGO Superman doll and striping the paper off of a bread twist tie to make glasses. And I remember building my own Hall of Justice out of a cardboard box complete with computers and such drawn on the inner walls. I even had chairs for my League which by then included Superman Batman and Aquaman, all with removable costumes (although Batman's cowl was painted on, so no Bruce Wayne time for him). I guess you could call that one of my earliest forays into 3-d art, if markers on cardboard qualifies as art. Comics had already hooked me in the 2-d arts, as I had reams of drawings that I had made by copying panels or parts of panels that caught my eye. I even remember trading bunches of Star Wars figures for stacks of comics. And although it pains the collector in me now, at the time, I thought I was such a shrewd trader.

Jump ahead to 1986, as I was driving to pick up my date for my senior prom, I spied a new shop setting up in the Houchens Plaza. I walked in in my tux and meet a man named John Henson who welcomed me to the unfinished store. It was called Alternate Realities. An honest to goodness comic shop was opening up in my town. It may not seem like much now but back then, comic shops were very rare in my part of the world. Needless to say, I became a regular customer and absolute nuisance to them and comics evolved slowly from interest to obsession and then to potential profession. I worked in the store (usually for comics as pay), collated APAs(think of them as message boards but on paper and mailed monthly), worked on my skills with the aforementioned Bill Nichols and generally tried to learn everything I could about the business as well as the Art of comics. A learning process that continues to this day. Through these associations, I have met publishers, professionals, heroes, friends, liars and assholes in the world of comic book creators.

The life of the comics professional never happened for me ( maybe someday, hope springing and all that) and both Alternate Realities and poor John are long gone, but those were the formative pieces that took a shy lonely boy and gave him something to help him grow into the imaginative, marginally well adjusted and slightly mad man that I am today.

So, that's a good thing, right?

Right.