Me and Comics (Part 2)

So there I was, a card-carrying (as discussed previously, that’s a literal statement) high school comic book nerd, anxiously grabbing up just about every new thing the Marvel Universe could throw at me. There were some pretty exciting (to us) new things happening during those days, too. Get this—the popular X-Men series was popular enough to create a spinoff series! I know, isn’t it unfathomable? The New Mutants was big news for us…and, little did we know, a major harbinger for things to come. Something else Marvel introduced during the early/mid-80s was another harbinger concept—the massive crossover. We went nuts when Contest of Champions came out in 1983, and not only did we get to see all our favorite Marvel heroes together—but we got to see them fight each other! This was just a mini-series (three issues), but Marvel took the idea and (marketing-minded gurus that they were) took it to an unprecedented level with 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issues “maxi-series” that used over 20 popular Marvel heroes and a whole bunch of villains. Speaking of marketing—it turns out the whole Secret Wars came to be because Mattel wanted to put out a Marvel line of toys, and wanted it to tie in with a big publishing event. Even the title was Mattel’s idea. They found out from focus group research that kids responded well to the word “secret” (I’m not making this up), and hence, Secret Wars came to be…to sell toys. But it also sold a lot of comics, and it started what would become an industry standard from then on.

In the midst of my “Marvel zombie” period—obsessed like everyone else in comics with all things X-Men—I found out that a big Marvel/DC crossover was to happen involving the X-Men, one that would team them with DC’s new phenomenon, the New Teen Titans. As I said elsewhere, I really didn’t have much interest in DC. My loyalty was to Marvel, and DC, in my mind, was for kids…you know, unlike Marvel (oh, sweet hindsight irony!). I knew DC characters form cartoons and toys, things of my young days, not my much-more-mature high school comic-reading period. But hearing of this forthcoming crossover issue, I got curious about these Titans everyone was gaga over. I decided to pick one up off the rack and take a look. And what a surprise! The art was done by George Perez, whom I was a huge fan of from his Avengers days. And it was written by Marv Wolfman, who I’d known as an editor at Marvel. Well, no WONDER it was so popular! It was being done by a couple of Marvel guys! With my interest piqued more than ever, and feeling I should get to know these characters so I’d enjoy the team-up story more, I grabbed two or three issues to check the Titans out.

And I was soon grabbing up every back issue I could (luckily for me, I’d come in only a couple of years into the book’s run), and had found one of my favorite comics of all time. Titans was DC’s answer to the X-Men craze, and there were many parallels—the ages of the characters, the focus on characterization, multi-part stories that occasionally went cosmic, and villains with complexity. It was amazing. Along with the X-Men, it was my monthly couldn’t-miss at the comic shop. It was also my beginning intro to the DC universe. In it, I learned of such teams as the Doom Patrol, which until that time I’d never heard of. And it was because of my love for the Titans that I ended up grabbing my REAL gateway to the DCU. It was DC’s answer to Marvel’s Secret Wars (though many argue it had been planned for so long, Marvel had really ended up just beating DC to the punch)—a 12-part series called Crisis on Infinite Earths.

DC took the crossover maxi-series idea to the next level…and beyond. This story set out with a bold concept—it was really designed to “reboot” DC continuity and clean up all the continuity problems the company had created over the years. And not just its own self-contained story, Crisis introduced the idea of the “tie-in”…all the other titles in the DCU, during the year of Crisis, had “Crisis tie-in” stories that made you feel you HAD to buy them or you wouldn’t have the whole story. This would become both a staple of Marvel and DC’s future (pretty much annual) events, and would become a much-maligned practice due to the way it was handled down the road (Secret Wars II was a great example, where “tie-ins” barely paid lip service the story in same cases, making readers feel like they’d been scammed into buying them).

While I didn’t go crazy enough to buy the tie-ins, the series itself was a must-buy for me because it was being done by the Titanic team of Wolfman and Perez (the undeniable golden boys of DC in the first part of the 80s). There were some big differences between this one and Secret Wars. Where Secret Wars involved a lot of characters thrown together in one situation, this epic (understatement) tale involved pretty much EVERY DC character—every corner of the DC Universe, and every era of the company’s comic history. It was a tale that was cosmic, spanning time and multiple realities. It truly was my guidebook to DC. I got to know, even in brief, the whole history of DC and all its characters, and got to see them all done by Perez, so they ALL looked cool and sparked my imagination. And major stuff happened! Major characters actually died! Supergirl went down! They killed the Flash! They ripped their own universe apart and rebuilt it in a new image, letting us newer readers get in on the ground floor. I read each issue multiple times (and I’ve never been much of a re-reader)…I almost had to, as so much was happening in both story and art (it’s unbelievable how much Perez can squeeze onto one page).

Actually, I just remembered my personal timeline on discovering it. I hadn’t actually learned about it until a couple of issues in. I saw it on a rack up on the counter, and I remember asking the guy there, “Hey, is this any good?” I clearly remember him looking at me and blinking. “Any good?” he asked me, both disbelieving and kind of a little pissed-off. “It’s only the best #@$%& comic every MADE.” His sales pitch, such as it was, worked (he almost scared me into buying it). I suddenly had to have it (NOW I remember…that’s when I discovered Wolfram and Perez were doing it). And he was very right. It was the greatest comic story I had ever read. And it officially broke me of my Marvel-only loyalty. Crisis still stands as a milestone in comic history, and it not only raised the bar for storytelling in comics, but also, along with Titans, FINALLY put DC back on the map (after getting their asses pretty much kicked by Marvel for about 20 years).

So I spent much of my high school years loving and devouring comics. But something happened partway into my senior year. I discovered something called a social life. All of a sudden, something happened that could only happen at a small school, I’m sure. I was part of the in-crowd. I was actually kind of in the inner circle, to tell the truth. My evenings and weekends were now filled with parties—and with partying—and comic reading and collecting took a back seat to going to midnight movies, hitting the pool party at the popular girl’s house, and getting into the kinds of trouble that I really should have been avoiding. Hey, I did have a great and memorable time, and it was nice, instead of sitting home reading X-Men adventures, to have people coming up to me in the halls at school to find out the plan for the coming weekend, and what we were going to do. It’s not often someone who was once the president of the Sacramento Marvelite Association gets to become cool. This required a sacrifice (or at least of lack of interest) of my long-time hobby, but it seemed like a fair trade-off for a time. Senior year ended up being a gas, and the world of mutants and titans rolled along without me.

For a time. As I came to find over the years, comics never really left my life completely. There were breaks, but my heroes were always there patiently waiting for my return.

(CONTINUED!)