Comic Book Memoir

My comics experience is changing again. Seems like that’s what it’s been doing from the start, an endless cycle of desire and reality, an intermingling quasi-marriage constantly denying me while giving me exactly what I want.

Well, let me start over. It seems a little weird to say this, because I’ve really only just begun this blog and it seems like something like awkward timing and an even worse admission, but as of yesterday, I’ve basically gotten out of the business of comics again. What I was saying earlier is relevant because the origins of Tony Laplume and his interest in comics don’t really have, specifically, comics themselves involved. Born in 1980, I had a lot of opportunities to catch up with all the stuff TV had been doing during that period. From the regular syndicated reruns of Adam West’s Batman to cartoons like SUPER FRIENDS and SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS (gosh, there sure were a lot of friends back then, and this technically before the Cold War ended!), and any number of the animated adventures of action figures, I was sated on the subject before I truly had a chance to grasp what it was I was enjoying. And speaking of toys, more than a few of them came with mini (and I do mean mini) comics, and so, technically, before I actively read comics, I had some in my possession.

As the first decade of my life came to a close, some events that were relevant to serious fans (not to denigrate cartoons or Adam West, but serious fans probably didn’t care too much about them) came to my attention. Robin was killed off. Years later I learned all about Jason Todd, but to a mind that had grown up with Burt Ward, it was pretty sad news, even though, again, technically speaking, I had no real basis, other than a treasured action figure, to care all that much. I was no comics reader at that point. Then, of course, Tim Burton gave us the black-clad Batman on the silver screen.

My brothers started buying comics around the time Jim Lee helped make X-MEN #1 a historic blockbuster (before moving on to Image not a short while longer). They liked Marvel. Kids at school liked Marvel. Heck, as a kid, one of my favorite characters had been Spider-Man, because of the cartoon, other confluences. But I was a DC kid, even then. They also liked Star Wars comics. I didn’t agitate a lot to read these. My sister had at some point acquired a copy of THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL, a comic that had absolutely fascinated me, so Marvel, so the comics world that didn’t involve DC, really did interest me. But personally, I was denied, always denied. There were no comics shops around, besides, nothing to tempt me.

And then there was. I got a few (and I do mean a very few) Green Lantern back issues. Green Lantern had been another favorite, simply because he happened to share my favorite color. Well, I don’t know how Hal Jordan ever thought of the color himself. It never seemed to come up. But there they were, my first real comics. My brothers did a little more DC themselves, including JUSTICE LEAGUE, Dan Jurgens’ version of the Bwahaha Generation. I rarely actually mention this in public, but I immediately gravitated to the mysterious Bloodwynd. I mean, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle were a fine comic duo (and this was probably their golden age, though everyone seems to have forgotten all about it, except that Doomsday dropped by on his way to killing Superman, but more on that in a moment), and Guy Gardner was a true jerk, but Bloodwynd, the first character I truly got to experience firsthand in a comic, thanks to brothers who grew slightly more accommodating to a younger brother (or perhaps I just stole a few opportunities, which I would continue to do for the next several years, especially when one of them ran up complete collections of all the zero issues, or “Knightfall”).

To mirror the newspaper reports of Robin’s death at the start of my comics experience, what truly dragged me in was, of course, the death of Superman. I had hardly read any comics at this point, but I knew, just like everyone else did, that I could not miss this. The difference between me and so many others being that it was only the beginning, and not just a curiosity, rubbernecking at the scene of an accident. Comics had become easier to find, and there were certain funds available to me, to help me along when I couldn’t get them myself. So Superman died, yeah, and then Bane came around and crippled Batman. Then Green Lantern went crazy. Every DC character experienced some kind of personal, crossroads-style crisis. Over at Marvel, I was aware that Spider-Man was undergoing a clone saga, but as I said, I was a DC man. Even if Spider-Man had been a favorite, I only really cared about DC, when I could finally manage to become a comics reader. There was plenty of DC to keep me interested.

For many readers, even those who stuck around comics, the saga of Superman in that period ended when he returned. For me, “Doomsday” and “Reign of the Supermen” was just the start of a series of events, from a series of committed and talented creators, that would keep me hooked for the duration of the decade. “The Fall of Metropolis,” “The Death of Clark Kent,” “The Trial of Superman,” the Electric Superman saga, which might as well be synonymous with that clone saga, for all the respect it gets.

Batman, of course, went through similar paces, but once Bruce Wayne reclaimed his mantle from Jean-Paul Valley, the writers were clever enough to keep the intrigue going. They immediately traded the cowl onto Dick Grayson, and then tried a new look for Bruce’s Dark Knight, and then set about a series of crossovers that would continue for about a decade, from “Contagion” to “Legacy” to “Cataclysm,” all the way to “War Games,” which effectively set the stage for Grant Morrison.

Sometimes, the comics I read meant I didn’t read others. I didn’t read SANDMAN, or STARMAN. I skipped over BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN. While I was avoiding those, I read Mark Waid’s FLASH religiously. Kyle Rayner was absolutely my Green Lantern, thanks to Ron Marz. I got into Morrison thanks to JLA, along with probably everyone else who will admit it. Wasn’t even aware of INVISIBLES, much less his work on DOOM PATROL or ANIMAL MAN, for years. In fact, much of the mystique I would later lend to him was over what I had missed in INVISIBLES, when there was talk about making it into a TV show. (Just imagine!) I read a few issues of BONE on the strong recommendation of a friend, but carried a torch for it longer than that, waited through several printings of the one volume edition before finally completing the epic for myself.

In all, I was a comics reader roughly from 1993 to 1999. There was a lot of stuff I truly loved that I haven’t referenced here, but there’s always time to circle back later. The reasons why 1999 was an end date were mostly practical. I was winding up my senior year in high school, and my parents figured that it would be a good idea to start saving for college. I had literally spent almost all of my money on comics to that point. They were absolutely right. Not that I would have ever said I had wasted any of it. So in the early months of 1999, I gave up the seven year habit that I had worked so hard to acquire. There were some stories I left in mid-sentence, and yes, I have been trying to track down some of those conclusions ever since. No, I am not obsessive in the sense that I would turn the earth upside-down, or look for the likeliest source to simply order missing comics or trade collections, but yeah, I am a little bad at letting go. I was not very happy that summer.

I read WIZARD to help pass the time, to wean myself from my addiction. Lots of interesting things kept happening. Geoff Johns just so happened to begin making his name exactly during this early transition period. He wrote a lot of comics for DC, but it wasn’t until I read what he did at Marvel, on AVENGERS, when I really noticed him for the first time. I didn’t like what I heard. Comics didn’t seem to be doing very well in my absence. Sure, there were a lot of noteworthy developments, and some pretty interesting comics being done, but all of it seemed to be passing me by, not in a sense that I was missing it, but that maybe, they no longer interested me. I read about them in a magazine, and they were meant for someone else. Nothing seemed to quite capture the spirit of what I had once known.

I graduated from college in 2003, and 2004 was a transition year. I had been reading about Geoff Johns again, how he had tackled The Flash, of all characters. But instead of sacrilege, or some poor imitation of Mark Waid, he really seemed to be making it his own. This was something new. On all the books I used to follow, the ones that were still around, there didn’t seem to be a lot of truly relevant material being done, but all of a sudden, there was. Brad Meltzer began to be talked about, IDENTITY CRISIS. And so, at some point, I had an excuse to step foot into a comics shop again, and I gravitated toward these two books. So it was that 2004 saw me dip my toe back into the pool. Sobriety was cracking up.

In 2005, I moved, it seemed, right next door to a comics shop, and I really fell off the wagon. The developments of that year are perhaps still fresh enough so that you’ll remember. Ed Brubaker relaunch CAPTAIN AMERICA. DC began revving up for INFINITE CRISIS. In 2006, I began to write about comics regularly for the first time, on the Internet. I wrote about them, and I started to read a lot of them, more than I ever had before. So it seemed. Maybe it was comparable to my earlier period, more than I realized at the time. I branched out from DC in a big way, more and more. I acquainted myself with many of the classics that I had heard so much about. When it became impractical to visit a local comics shop, I began buying my comics online. The economy, of course, tanked. I kept buying. Ridiculously, shamelessly, I kept buying.

I phrase it like that to begin to explain why this column marks the end of that era. Roughly 2005 to 2011. I had to quit again. This time by my own hand. It became financially responsible to say, “enough is enough.” Maybe it helped that many of the comics I was following had reached natural transition periods. Or that the surge in available collections made it that much harder to claim that if I didn’t catch the single issues, I would miss out forever. I knew it wasn’t true. I knew I had to dial it down. And I did, I even did that. But it finally came down to, “enough is enough.” It’s not that I realized I don’t need comics, but that I realized, whether I’m there or not, they’re still there. I finally got to see Green Lantern popular! All three incarnations (well, all four, really) of Robin, even, are alive and kicking! I followed Spider-Man through “Brand New Day,” the first time I have ever read the Webslinger regularly. Grant Morrison led Batman through his greatest stories ever. I watched Jeff Smith shape a new landscape of indescribable intrigue.

I don’t want to write about too many specifics. This blog isn’t going away. I have plenty more to write about. But it’s another transition time, a good time to reflect on my comics experience, how it keeps coming back to the fact that, technically speaking, I’m one comics reader who keeps coming back to not actually reading comics. It’s true and it’s not true and I guess that explains me, exactly where I fit in with the rest of the crowd. I don’t pretend to be an expert on everything, but I have a passion that can overcome just about anything, even this, even giving up, technically speaking, comics all over again. I’m not one of those readers who got fed up with what the creators were doing, or the publishers, or just ran out of funds. I can fake funds. But I can’t overlook the fact that as a comics reader, for me it sometimes means so much more than actually reading comics.

I will continue to write about comics, and I will continue to read the occasional issue, the collection, even the graphic novel. I will just be doing it from a distance, from the shadows, as it were. It seems appropriate. For every Booster Gold, there is a Simon Dark. There are plenty of worlds left to explore.