Me and Comics (Part 3 - The College Years)

Okay, so I’d left comics behind for a while and decided to get drunk have fun and get bad grades instead. But high school was over, and I was starting community college (still called “junior college” back then), and there’s no way to be popular at one of those anyway, so my concerns shifted slightly. Not enough to start comics back up, right away, but I did get into role-playing games. I got into this Champions game that this guy K.C. was running. Champions, being a super-hero role-playing game, does tend to attract the comic book fans. K.C. was one, and so were the other players involved. Some of those other players became quick friends of mine, and we started hanging out. One of those guys was Kevin, and Kevin was definitely a comic fan.

So as the weeks and months passed, and I started hanging out more and more at Kevin’s place, he started talking about what I’d been missing in comics. He was mostly a D.C. guy. I’d been out of the comic game for a while, and he was shocked to find out that I had no idea about this “Watchmen” series that was going on. He, with great enthusiasm, explained the whole thing to me—as much as one CAN explain Watchmen to someone. DC was putting out the book, but it wasn’t DC characters. It involved these sort-of original characters—but ones based on the Charlton characters that DC now owned (but were now being used in DC continuity after Crisis, so the actual ones could not be used in Watchmen. He basically gave up trying to explain it and just gave me the existing issues to read. Nine of them were out at the time, nine of the series of twelve. I can’t properly express how stunned I was after reading them. I had grown up on super-hero comics, but I never understood properly what could be done with the medium. Alan Moore, the writer of Watchmen, was not writing a comic book—he was writing a novel. A complex and compelling one, one with themes and symbols and unimaginably (for comics) rich and living characters. It was a complete deconstruction of the super-hero genre, and the chapters (issues) had to be read several times over to get all the detail (and I mean that in a good way). Now completely engrossed and addicted, I was back at the comic store for the next three months, just to get the remaining chapters of Watchman, and the anticipation of the final issue was shared by the whole of the comic community, one of those frozen moments in time that you’ll just never see again, where all of one body of fandom held its collective breath. Once it was complete, it was collected in a trade paperback, as one volume, and it defined what we now know to be the graphic novel. It was studied. It was debated. It was reviewed in Rolling Stone. And to give you an example of its long-lasting appeal and quality? In 2005, Time Magazine put out a list of the top 100 English-language novels from 1923 to present. Watchmen made that list. And to give you an idea of just how complex a thing Watchmen is, they’ve been trying for twenty years to make it into a film, and it’s gone through so many different directors and studios and writers, I’ve lost track—and each new attempt has ended in collapse. But now, FINALLY, it’s in the process of being made, and was handed to “300” director Zack Snyder (and that’s a film made from a Frank Miller graphic novel, in case you didn’t know), and I think we all finally have some hope that it’ll be done KIND of right. There’s no way to capture Watchmen properly in a two-hour film. Can’t be done. I’ve been lobbying all along for an HBO mini-series. But I think Zack will do it as much justice as can be done, so I’m looking forward to it.

While I still wasn’t a regular comic buyer, I had seen evidence of what the industry was becoming, and what it could be, and it was very exciting. Right around that same time, Kevin also introduced me to Frank Miller’s “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”, another groundbreaking series that came out in individual issues but gained its biggest appeal as a bound graphic novel after the fact. It, too, not only redefined comics and super-heroes, but also dazzled the mainstream press (the same ones that always made us roll our eyes when, every couple of years or so, they’d put out a story with a title like, “Biff, Socko, Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!”). Miller jumped the Batman character 20 years into the future, a dark future in a world whose heroes had left them behind. The book was another deconstruction, but not just of super-heroes. Miller set his sights on modern western (American) civilization, culture and politics, and created something so cinematic that it at once begged to be made into a film, but also made you want to stop anyone from every trying, lest they spoil its perfection (very much like Watchmen). Though this series did bring the Batman character and franchise back into popularity and led, I think directly, to the creation of Tim Burton’s Batman film. This series, along with Watchman, launched a whole new era of “realistic” and serious works of comics, leading to the things like DC’s art-minded Vertigo line and to obsessions over new works by Miller and Moore, and also newcomers like Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan. Like me, comics had grown up.

Kevin got me reading other things, too, that I would either bum off him or read right there in his attic bedroom. Denny O’Neil’s “The Question” was one, and it, too, was a work I never could have imagined back in my X-Men and Avengers days. I also checked out “Batman: The Killing Joke”, a famous work of the period written by Alan Moore (art by Brian Bolland) that explored the relationship between Batman and the Joker, and particularly explored the psyche of the Joker in ways no other comic had. It was shockingly dark, a point made obvious by the Joker shooting and permanently paralyzing Barbara Gordon (Batgirl)…and taking nude photos of her bleeding body to taunt her father, the Commissioner, with. That’s one Kevin probably shouldn’t have loaned me, though. I had way too much to drink one night and threw up on it. No worries…I bought him a new one. There’s a good object lesson for you there. Don’t drink (Southern Comfort) and read comics. Most of the good happening with comics seemed to be happening in DC at that time, as Frank Miller continued his rebuilding of the Batman legend with “Batman: Year One” and other works. Marvel, unfortunately, from what I could tell, was on more of a downward spiral, just clinging to their X-Men line (that was already spawning into several more series) and creating sillier and lower-quality works. But, hey, the kids kept buying them, so they didn’t care much about high art at Marvel. Capitalism. What can you do?

I really wasn’t buying much as the 80s bled into the 90s—particularly since Kevin went into the Marines and wasn’t around to loan me things anymore or turn me on to what to buy. There was a time when I tried to jump back into the comic shop, once when I had some extra money to throw around. I decided to try something new, and I bought a bunch of independent comics. This was a pretty new concept at the time. Your choices had pretty much always been Marvel or DC. Now this new upstart company, Dark Horse, was making a go, and a couple of others, too. I ended up buying and really digging their series “The American”. Unfortunately, most of the other indies I bought were forgettable crap, but hey…somebody has to start the process. Those early crap works by struggling wannabes plowed the field for the bigger independent market to come. Though in there, I did discover Grimjack This was a really whacked kind-of-sci fi book created by John Ostrander and Tim Truman, and published by First Comics. REALLY loved this book. I just noticed that it’s made a return in the past couple of years, but past experiences I’ve had with old creators bringing back their famed characters don’t leave me with a lot of hope of lightning striking again. One of my coolest memories of the Grimjack was finding out that a buddy of mine, Ron Edwards, used to run a Champions game in Chicago that included John Ostrander and his wife as players. In one of the Grimjack issues, there’s a map of Cynosure (the main city of the book), and one of the places mentioned is “Rod Eduardo’s Pizza” – a little homage to Ron from John. I thought that was cool.

I mainly found out what was happening with comics, and tried the occasional new thing, when going to the San Diego Comic-Con. This started in 1990 for me and became an annual tradition, one that involved meeting up there was buddies of mine to have a good time. I’d go to panels and check out the company tables and see what big things were going on. And I’d usually buy a handful of things each year to try. One big score was when my pal Aaron got me to pick up “Pirate Corp$”, an indie originally put out by Eternity Comics but later picked up by Slave Labor. This ridiculously original book was the creation of then-young artist Evan Dorkin, who wrote and drew (and later lettered, when he couldn’t afford a letterer anymore) the creator-owned work, which Aaron had described to me a space opera “ska” comic. I had to know. And I fell in love with it!!! This is the same Dorkin who would later be better known for his “Milk & Cheese” comics and his regular (snicker) series called “Dork”, but this was him at the start of his comics career, back when his love of the space genre (and ska music…and hockey…) was evident. It was set in the future and involved a main character that obviously WAS Dorkin on a ship’s crew with a diverse and great collection of alien types. That sentence isn’t doing those characters any justice at all, but I’m going to talk more about the Corp$ in a later blog. Things started off pretty sci-fi-like in the first issues. But what was really fascinating was watching as the book (particularly when it got a name-change to “Hectic Planet”) evolved as his life did. It quickly just became a character book instead of being in any way plot-focused, and started dealing with themes of love (and losing it), loss, lack of dough, the club scene… The sad news is that he just eventually stopped doing it and focused his once-every-couple-of-years publishing on Dork (not that I’m complaining…that’s consistently one of the most wrongly funny things you’ll ever read. Nobody does more painfully dead-on brilliant social commentary than Dorkin), but Slave Labor did collect ‘em all up in trade paperbacks, and I’m happy to own them all. They stood out for me as an example of someone who just had his own creation, his own vision, and just got out there and did it and didn’t care what anyone thought. And the result (even if it didn’t make him loads of dough) was something unique and oddly wonderful. Good for you, Dorkin. And thanks.

But aside from the Comic-Con stuff, comics were really gone for me once more. College was soon over (that means I decided to drop out before graduating, by the way), and I suddenly found myself with a woman in my life. For those of with stories of how comics and women DO mix in your life? Screw you! Uh, I mean, congratulations. For me, didn’t work out that way, and that was fine, because I was pretty sure I’d said good-bye to the funny books. I was still going to Comic-Con every summer, but that was really just to hang out with the guys. But not buying any comics. Soon I had moved to Arizona, hadn’t bought a comic in forever, and didn’t even know where a comic shop was in the Phoenix area.

But comics do tend to sneak back up on you. And sometimes in unexpected ways. Like, with a chance to actually write one of them….

(STAY TUNED!)