Yesterday’s Stack

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.