Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (16) - A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to My Degree

Going away to college would have been as likely a time for me to ease up on collecting comics as starting high school had been, except for a couple of factors. Number one, the 90’s collector craze was really gaining steam, so it wasn’t just a personal hobby/obsession (hobsession?), it was being goaded and catered to by a whole market orientation nexus of stores and magazines and conventions and the comic books themselves. Number two, I immediately made some friends on my freshman hall who were just as dorky and into comics as I was, so instead of pretending I was indifferent to the superhero kid stuff in order to seem cool and fit in, I was able to catch rides with these kind souls to the comic shop near campus and continue indulging at will.

And so I did, but a weird shift took place. For the first time in my life, I started reading more of, and caring more about, DC Comics’ output as opposed to Marvel’s. This interregnum was fueled by a confluence of several elements:

1. Even now I still remember how at the beginning of my freshman year in college, the late summer of ‘92, the big news - as in, not just among me and my fellow geeks but actual national news - was the Death of Superman. DC Comics pulled off a real coup by killing off Superman and milking it for a couple of years’ worth of storylines … at the end of which he came back to life, of course he did, death is seldom permanent in comics and maybe the general non-comics-reading public didn’t realize that but some of us (ahem) should have known better. Still it really captured some eyeballs, and I was no exception.
   

   The Death of Superman was so successful that DC followed it up with similar attempts at shock and rebirth. Batman had a crazy storyline called Knightfall, and Green Lantern had Emerald Twilight, and that was what really got me. Superman/Clark Kent came back to life, and Batman/Bruce Wayne had his back broken and was replaced for a while but eventually healed up and reclaimed the mantle. But Green Lantern/Hal Jordan went nuts because his entire home city and everyone in it was destroyed (as a plot point in the Return of Superman, as it happened) and became evil, and was a villain thereafter, and a brand new character named Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern, which of course meant a new beginning from which to accrue lore and continuity. I had been a GL fan for years but now there was a Green Lantern who I could say was mine, because I had been there collecting issues since his first appearance in real time, and of course that was irresistible to me. Superman and Batman were back to normal before I graduated college, but Kyle Rayner was still Green Lantern a decade later. Hal wasn’t restored as Green Lantern until 2004.


2. By about halfway through college I had met and befriended someone who was a diehard comics fan and much more into DC Comics than I had ever been. He, too, liked both DC and Marvel (Daredevil was a personal favorite of his) but he was very deep on some DC stuff I had never heard of. He introduced me to books like the then-current Suicide Squad and Checkmate and Hawk & Dove, as well as some older stuff I had missed. On top of that, he liked to run a particular roleplaying game, DC Heroes, which had licensed the characters from the comics. I joined his campaign and played it for years, and although I and all the other players had created original characters, the campaign ostensibly took place in the DC universe and we all had various connections to the continuity (fighting Gorilla Grodd, working for WayneTech, etc.) So in a very real sense reading as many DC comics as possible became the research homework for playing in the game, and I gladly did it.
3. And then meanwhile Marvel was having a tough time of it. X-Men finally got so ridiculously convoluted and crossover event-driven that I gave up on it. Avengers just plain dipped in quality, in my opinion, and right around when they changed the logo on the cover, I was out. I still picked up What If…? pretty devotedly, but that was definitionally non-canon so I really had no insight into what was going on in the Marvel universe, and meanwhile the editorial stance for the comics seemed to have gone from recap-heavy and new reader friendly in the 80’s to catering exclusively to hardcore fans in the 90’s, who were assumed to have encyclopedic knowledge of every character and event already, and/or the willingness to go through the back issue bins at comics shops as needed.
   
   By the time I was out of college in mid-1996, DC had revitalized itself (in my eyes, if nothing else) and was riding high on everything from Batman: The Animated Series to Kingdom Come. Mean while Marvel had pulled the desperation maneuver of outsourcing non-X-Men comics to the artists who had left to form image Comics, like Rob Liefeld …
   

   … aaaaaand shortly thereafter declared bankruptcy. Rough times.

So yeah, I weirdly fell out of love with Marvel Comics in college and was much more of a DC guy for a while. I mention this as I trace my relationship with Marvel for a couple of reasons. One, to acknowledge that it wasn’t always smooth sailing, I wasn’t an impervious Marvel zombie, and like any relationship it had its ups and downs. And two, because I have to talk about the falling out before I can talk about the reconciliation, which I will do next post.

Smallywood

I've been writing this blog on and off for like eleven or twelve years now, and I seem to vaguely recall that I used to take great delight in noticing and pointing out unintentional overlaps in my pop culture consumption, like when I finally got around to reading or watching something that had been on my list for years, and suddenly realized it was a predecessor and drect influence of something else I'd gotten into on a whim with no foreknowledge of the connection. Or when I'd discover the same creative types had been involved in two wholly separate projects I dug. I am pleased to report that these things still very much amuse me.

I recently started watching the CW series Legends of Tomorrow from the beginning, via Netflix. Longtime blog fans may recall that I was hugely into the CW's Smallville back in the day; I own every season on DVD and watched the whole thing in order via that medium (mostly using a portable DVD player on the train when I worked as a government contractor, all of which feels like a lifetime ago). I don't know if I ever mentioned it on the blog or not, but when the CW announced Arrow, it was still close enough to my finishing the Smallville run that I was irked it was a new actor playing Oliver Queen, since Green Arrow had been a bg part of the latter half of Smallville. I did not jump into Arrow, but somehow the show got along fine without me, and generated an entire Arrowverse which includes The Flash, Supergirl, Batwoman, Black Lightning, and Legends of Tomorrow.

Legends of Tomorrow is a show that should not work. It's a large ensemble made up of also-ran supporting characters from several of the other shows I mentioned, who are on a time travel mission to stop an immortal conqueror before he succeeds in the future. It is a million bonkers comicbook ideas all crammed together, on a second-tier broadcast television budget. But! It is gloriously, endearingly goofy and I find myself utterly charmed by it. I expected I might be, and it did not disappoint.

(I also have heard that it gets better as it goes along, so we shall see about that. It was the hype about the recent release of the newest season, combined with chatter indicating that it was really great how this show which started out vaguely terrible quietly became arguably the best of the Arrowverse shows, that got me to take the plunge. I also-also know that eventually Matt Ryan joins the cast reprising his role as John Constantine from the cancelled NBC series, which my wife and I were both into, so when I get to the point where he starts showing up I will drag her along on the binge watch as well.)

No more train commutes for me these days I've been watching episodes of Legends of Tomorrow while I run on the treadmill. I'm only about 9 episodes in so far, but it's a good start. Last night, meanwhile, my wife was working late so I decided to treat myself to streaming movie. I have been meaning to see Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live. Die. Repeat.) for a while now, I reckon ever since people on the internet started publishing reconsideration thinkpieces along the lines of "Hey, Edge of Tomorrow had a dumb title and barely made a blip on its theatrical release but it's so good, way better than you might think a sci-fi alien invasion riff on Groundhog Day has any right to be!" The movie came out in 2014, those pieces probably started appearing by 2015, so it's been a hot minute.

Anyway, the movie was in fact pretty good! Definitely entertaining on the visceral action movie level, and mostly satisfying on the time loop narrative level (I'm still puzzling over whether the ending makes sense or is a total cheat). Bravo to Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.

I'll point out now that it was a mindless coincidence that I was gorging on two different properties with the word 'Tomorrow' in their title, and that's cute. BUT! What I really came here to talk about was actually the fact that I'm lying on the couch last night, watching Edge of Tomorrow, and Tom Cruise meets the squad he's been assigned to, and lo and behold who is one of his bunkmates but Franz Drameh! And I know what you're thinking: who? And I wouldn't have known this young actor either, if it hadn't been for Legends of Tomorrow, where he plays Jefferson Jackson, one half of Firestorm.

Like I said, it just very much amuses me when I start watching a show from 2016 and a couple weeks later watch a movie from 2014 and get smacked in the face with "Hey! Same guy!" Not super surprising, I suppose, given how some Hollywood agents seem to be able to get certain hot clients into a bunch of things one right after the other sometimes. But amusing nonetheless.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (15) - Every Part of the Buffalo

As should be glaringly obvious, once I started acquiring comic book collector supplies, like longboxes and mylar sleeves and whatnot, I wholeheartedly committed myself to the idea of having not just a personal comics collection but a large and diverse, deep and wide comics collection. The fact that this was happening in the fall of ‘91/spring of ‘92 was advantageous for a couple of reasons. My family moved across town around that time, which put us much closer (within walking distance) to my hometown Friendly Local Comics Shop. My high school girlfriend also went off to her freshman year of college at that time, which meant I had way more free time to fill with comics, and few other ways to spend whatever money I had.

But most of all, Marvel was putting out a lot of comics which hit me in just the right way. A lot of people have bemoaned comics companies’ modern tendency to make everything a crossover which means you have to pick up multiple titles, some of which you weren’t regularly following, in order to get the whole story. This is crass and bottom-line-oriented, I admit, but in 1991-92 I was a sucker for it. Infinity Gauntlet was just one example. A few months after that, the Avengers started another outerspace adventure called Operation: Galactic Storm (ah, memories of when the USA’s military flexing in the Middle East was nothing short of a miraculous source of jingoistic pride) and this crossover was NINETEEN PARTS LONG including not just Avengers but also West Coast Avengers and the solo titles Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Wonder Man and Quasar. And boy did I pick up a lot of those, and dutifully bag and file them alphabetically in my growing back catalog. Even Quasar!

(Quasar is, superficially, a Marvel riff on Green Lantern, in that he has a gizmo - quantum wristbands rather than a ring - which allows him to do the make-any-construct schtick. Which means I was predisposed to like Quasar from the get-go. Here I will note I was regularly collecting Green Lantern during this period as well, along with other random DC issues here and there, from Batman to The Demon. My version of deep and wide didn’t really extend as far as the proliferation of lower-tier publishers in the 90’s like Dark Horse or Valiant or Malibu, but it did encompass both of the Big Two. This will become extra relevant next post.)

Additionally, Marvel still managed to launch new titles pretty regularly, and by fully embracing the concept of collecting I didn’t just want to have a bunch of old comics, I wanted to consider my collection an investment with certain high-value items, including those #1 issues that would become more and more sought-after over time (or so the theory went at the time). The Infinity Gauntlet mini-series begat an ongoing Warlock and the Infinity Watch series, and I purchased #1. I had never been a Punisher fan, but I knew he was crazy popular and so when he got his third(!!!) ongoing title, I mindfully picked up Punisher War Zone #1.

Meanwhile over on the oddly self-contained mutant side of things, over the span of summer ‘91 Marvel brought out X-Force #1 (replacing the cancelled New Mutants title) to much fanfare and a second X-Men title (the long-runninng decades-old title was Uncanny X-Men, the new one was simply X-Men) to even greater fanfare, such that at the time and for a long while afterwards (maybe to this day?) X-Men #1 was the highest-selling comic book. Of. All. Time. With five variant covers! And reader, I admit, I bought all five.

All of the above are examples which stand out in my mind but really the main point is that the floodgates had opened and I just went to the FLCS at least once a week and almost never left empty-handed. As fate would have it even though my parents moved across town at the end of my junior year of high school, as mentioned, they moved again (because Dad had gotten a job transfer) towards the middle of the summer after I graduated high school, and for the few weeks I spent in that new town before departing for college, I knew no one except my little bro and had nothing to do except go the new FLCS and buy whatever they had (or so it felt). And then came college … to be continued ...

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (14) - Things Get Serious

My family used to go to my grandparents’ (on Dad’s side) beach house on Long Island Sound once or twice every summer. Sometimes we would go for the Fourth of July, when as often as not all of my aunts and uncles and cousins would be there as well, somehow all under one roof for a long weekend (to be fair we were only ever all under said roof when sleeping, and the rest of the time we were on the beach, or out on the water, or in the backyard eating and drinking, or roaming the neighborhood going down to the park and the combination general store and ice cream parlor, which also sold comics!, but I digress). And sometimes it would just be my nuclear family and my grandparents for a more sedate weeklong visit in August. Sometimes both if we were lucky.

In the summer of ‘91 we made one of our just-us visits and on one of those afternoons my grandmother took little bro and me out for the afternoon. This was a deviation from the norm which always kind of stuck oddly in my brain. I was 16 at the time, old enough to think it was strange but not old enough to either ask what was up or be able to figure it out on my own. My grandmother was always happy to play a more hands-off role in spoiling and indulging us as kids. She would give us some ridiculously easy chore to do, like husking corn on the cob or sweeping sand off the front porch, and then pay us for our labor and send us down to the aforementioned general store, cash in hand and unaccompanied, to buy candy or popsicles or Mad magazine or play Zaxxon or whatever. She was not one to bundle us into the car, drive us into town, and walk around a department store letting us pick out treats (that was my Mom’s mom’s go-to move). Yet that was exactly what happened on the day of this random memory. Grandma took us to I believe three different stores, purely to buy us treats. Weird, but young and dumb and 16 as I may have been, I wasn’t going to argue and/or look a gift horse in the mouth.

(It literally only occurs to me right now as I write this that maybe this had something to do with giving my parents a little space? My very little bro would have been 3, and I don’t remember what the deal was with him, maybe my grandfather took him to the playground. But having two teenagers and a toddler would be hard on anyone, and we all know now in hindsight that in the summer of ‘91 my parents’ marriage was about one year away from imploding; they would drop the bomb announcing their intention to divorce right after the fall break of my freshman semester in late ‘92. So maybe this was my grandmother’s way of throwing a hail mary? Giving my parents a little one-on-one time to enjoy each other’s company and maybe work things out? In my defense my parents played things very close to the vest and absolutely projected at all times that they were happily married and hunky-dory right up until the bottom fell out of everything. But wow, if this conjecture I’m putting together is true, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to make the connection. Ah well.)

The first place we went was the used book store, which also happened to have old back issue comics for sale. I had been to this store before, ever since my aunt had discovered it and introduced me to it, in the mid-80’s. I haven’t mentioned it before now in this series because (despite how it may seem otherwise) this isn’t an exhaustive recounting of every comic I ever acquired, and good stuff always came of my once-a-year trips to this store but nothing especially noteworthy. We also went to the toy store, I’m pretty sure, and one other place which might have just been a drug store? Clearly I’m fuzzy on the details. Best I can recall, now that I put my mind to it, it was probably something like this: grandma asked where I wanted to go, I said the used book store. She asked little bro, he said the toy store. And then while we were out she popped into the drug store for, I don’t know, sunscreen or batteries or whatnot. I’m only belaboring the three store angle because ultimately they all ended up involving comic book acquisitions.

The used book store connection is self-evident. At the toy store there was a ‘comic book collector’s starter set’ which consisted of a sturdy cardboard box of the proper dimensions to store comics standing up, and like five random recent issues. It was all Marvel-branded, the box decorated with black and white line art of Spidey and the Hulk, and my brother decided he wanted it, so into the cart it went. Then finally at the drug store they happened to have a spinner rack of new comics, and in addition to the moldy oldies I had gotten at our first stop, I decided to ask grandma if I could get one or two new ones. She agreed (yeah, come on, she had to be worried on some level about her son’s marriage splitting up and as responding to the emotional crisis that on one was addressing head on with the tried and true white folk stand by, throwing money at it) and so I got my hands on this:

So here we are, then, at long last, at essentially the intersection point between my lifelong love of Marvel comics and modernity. Sure, this comic came out literally thirty years ago, but we now know that the Infinity Gauntlet became foundational in shaping the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is the purest distillation of modern Marvel. You can dive back through the archives and see the earliest, roughest outlines of things, and go down an infinite number of rabbitholes only to find the vast majority of them are circular loops that return everything to the status quo, but once you get a sense of quo, exactly, is status, you’ll possess a mental model which matches pretty closely to both what I think of as “Marvel Comics” after a lifetime of fandom and “the MCU” as it’s evolved into pop culture dominance. Infinity Gauntlet was an event comic in much the same way Infinity War/Endgame were event movies, so I think it’s worth elevating as a significant signpost in my fandom. The fact that I stumbled over it in a random retail setting while shopping with my grandma is just bizarre enough to be noteworthy, too.

The other thing to point out here is that little bro’s ‘collector starter set’ soon made me realize that I needed my own dedicated storage system for comics. So I also see this particular outing as the turning point where I went from “frequent reader of comics” to “dedicated curator of a comics collection”. That, in turn, had a marked effect on my reading/buying habits, both in terms of quantity and scope, and I will touch on that next post.

Metrics Only I Care About

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the most recent post (Day 425 of the pandemic diary) was this blog's 16th post of 2021. Which means, as of this very post you are reading, the blog has updated more times in 2021 than in any year since all the way back in 2016. I don't see myself ever going back to posting five times a week, so it's beyond unlikely that I'll ever hit the highs I did circa 2012-2013, but still. It's nice that I've kept this weird little corner of the interwebs limping along for a dozen years and counting.

Thanks for reading, fellow weirdos!

425

I didn't want to jinx it, so I waited until today to post that, two weeks ago, I got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So since they say it takes fourteen days after the second injection to be considered fully, effectively vaccinated ... that's me, as of today.

And thus my household is as protected as we can be. My wife and I are fully vaccinated, and my kids are, well, kids. I read about a methodology of risk analysis that basically says being vaccinated reduces your chances of catching COVID-19 AND suffering serious complications/death as a result to less than 10%. And kids seem to be naturally resistant to both the coronavirus and advanced health complications associated with it, such that any given child's chances of catching sick and needing hospitalization are ... less than 10%. So from a statistical risk point of view my children are as safe as I am, none of us 100% but hey, ain't that life for ya.

Please indulge me for a moment as I express my gratitude for the continuing health of my loved ones. In many profound ways, I remain immeasurably fortunate. No one in my family, immediate or extended, so much as contracted COVID-19, let alone died from it (knock on wood, we as a species are not out of the woods yet). Is that partly because the vast majority of my family is in the lower-risk categories? And partly because we were all willing to take the precautions recommended by the medical and scientific experts as they evolved over the course of the pandemic? And partly pure dumb luck? Yes, yes and yes. But although I happen to live in the upper-middle class bubble and I'm surrounded by and related to people with white collar jobs in blue states where they kept the offices and schools closed and nobody succumbed to paranoid conspiracy theories about their liberties being egregously infringed by mask mandates, I know it's not that cut and dried! COVID has proven time and again that is does not discriminate, and can cut across the larger trends at any time. I do know a few people who caught it, people who are a little younger than me, and smarter than me, who literally work in the medical research field and definitely understood and practiced every protocol! It's not just the very old, the very poor, and total fucking morons like Donald Trump who proved susceptible. Maybe in the end it just comes down to luck, period.

A further irony is the fact that, while my household dodged the bullet of the pandemic itself, the past year-and-change has seen its share of, shall we say, health challenges. It is as true for us as for anyone that the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 saw none of come down with mild flu or even a cold, thanks to masks and social distancing and general hermit-like behavior. But on the other hand, at the very beginning of the pandemic somehow the whole family had lice, somehow! And just last week the bino had to have surgery to repair his ruptured eardrums that never healed after some savage ear infections. Also, did I mention that I almost killed him with diabetes?

Perhaps I should unpack that last one a little bit. There are of course many things which this sporadic pandemic blog series has failed to capture, but one of those (which maybe could only have been addressed in hindsight) is the strange contradiction between the subjective feeling that life went on pause for a while, time ceased to have any meaning, and we kind of lost a whole year, versus the fact that all of the above is objectively untrue, and I live with three reminders of that fact. The little guy has grown like four inches, the little girl has begun edging into puberty (even though she just turned ten last month, which is a whole 'nother post) and the 'bino has just changed a lot, because he's at the tail end of that stage where the development comes fast and furious, mental and emotional and physical. And he's always been big for his age, which usually just meant "tall" but this past twelve months somehow went to, um, "in a distressingly high percentile for weight"?

One thing that I have learned in the past year-and-change about myself is that, unequivocally, food is my love language. When I think about my loved ones, whether it's on the needs level of physically taking care of them or on the wants level of making them happy or demonstrating that they matter to me, my go-to domain is feeding people. I do over-the-top cakes for the kids' birthdays, and always let them pick what's on the menu for family dinner that night. I happily work the grill at house parties, I love taking my wife out to dinner to celebrate milestones and I will run to the 7-11 for a pint of Ben and Jerry's if she's had a rough day. Thanksgiving and Christmas are literal feast days in our house. Etc. etc. etc.

And it's possible, in fact entirely likely, that at some point during the pandemic I have bitched about nowadays it seems like all I ever do is shop for groceries, cook, and clean, and that is true enough and utterly explicable because we are all stuck in the house all the time and no one eats at school or work so it all settles out as increased domestic workload, but while I bitch about it I also absolutely cling to it, I admit. As long as I have been making sure my nearest and dearest have been getting three squares a day, I feel a tiny bit of control and safety in this perilous year, and that has kept me sane. I bitch about it but I'm also so grateful for it (do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself).

Of course I never do anything halfway, either, and abve and beyond providing for my family I want to make them happy, or in the case of 2020, at least distract them a little from the pervasive awfulness. Kids ate all the granola bars? No problem I'll just buy more. They want Doritos for a snack? OK, we can designate Fridays as Doritos days. A bag of Oreos makes everyone happy? That is a bargain by any measure. So yeah, for a while there when it came to food I just wasn't saying no to the kids all that much. Yes we bought fresh fruit and yes we made them eat their vegetables at dinner, but they are a couple of elementary schoolers and a pre-teen, the food that makes them happy is McDonald's and pizza and soda and sweet tea and ice cream and candy and junkity junk junk galore. (And don't think for one minute I was merely an ascetic enabler through all of this. I may have singlehandedly kept a couple of the Mix industries, namely Chex and Trail, afloat during the pandemic.) The point being I was well aware that none of this stuff was super ultra healthy for them but I weighed the pros and cons and the trade-off for mental stability and just went ahead and spoiled them with processed high fructose corn syrup on demand.

And sure enough, the 'bino packed it away and started to pack it on. At first we (I) thought it was one of those early childhood things where they get a little belly fat but it's just storing up for an imminent growth spurt and goes away as quickly as it came. Then it didn't go away and I thought, well, I was a chunky kid too and he does arguably look the most like me out of all three of them, maybe that's the way it goes. Then one day at a routine wellness check the doctor says they want to run some blood tests on the kid for diabetes, like that's a literal possibility, and suddenly it's nothing but GUILT and you feel like a failure as a parent. Or worse than a failure who committed sins of omission, but a monster who committed active harm against your own child. Which sucks.

Of course I started this tangent by saying "almost" so let's reel it in a little here. The 'bino is not, as of this writing, diabetic, the blood tests were negative. But he is tipping the scales inthe 99th percentile. And we've talked to him about it, and cut back on the Doritos, and emphasized the importance of exercise and activity in general. And he gets it, he really does, he's a super-smart and conscientious kid. We caught a troubling trend on his growth chart early enough that he will hopefully turn out just fine. But man, you know it's been a doozy of a year(-and-change) when your best coping mechanisms so spectacularly backfire.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (13) - Going to Disney World

I picked up comics intermittently as the 80’s gave way to the 90’s and my middle school years became my high school ones. I certainly know it’s true for me, and I assume it’s equally present in the mind of anyone else around my age who was into comics back then, but there’s a huge difference between “80’s comics” and “90’s comics”, or at least in the concepts those broad and oversimplified divisions might evoke. In the 60’s Marvel comics went from brand new upstarts in the superhero periodicals biz to basically the leading light of the industry. Then in the 70’s they got weirder, bigger, more complex along every axis. The 80’s were the decade when they knew what they were doing and did it with exemplary competence (give or take a misfiring New Universe or two). And then the 90’s got weird again, but not in a good way. In my recollection, the 90’s were when flashy hyperstylized art became way more important than storytelling, and if you haven’t already surmised, I was always way more into the stories than the art. I liked the art, but I was hooked by the characters and the plots. It also was far enough past the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” lessons of the mid-80’s for people to have forgotten those missteps, and even the more traditional artists and dedicated storytellers found themselves somehow tasked with producing updated takes on classic characters, with new costumes, new motivations, new origins or legacies or what have you, which were more in line with the cultural zeitgeist of the the end of the millennium - all things edgy, extreme and “kewl”.

But I am getting ahead of myself! Yes, when you say “80’s Marvel comics” I think of solid, classic best-of-breed and when you say “90’s Marvel comics” I think excess, over-indulgence, and oh yeah Marvel actually went bankrupt for a while. But on the one hand these are, again, broad generalizations and exceptions certainly existed in both directions. And on the other hand, there wasn’t some massive switch that flipped on January 1, 1990. So as my mid-teens progressed I checked in on Marvel’s newsstand offerings every now and then and found them, generally, to be recognizable and enjoyable.

And then a funny thing happened in the spring of 1990, the end of my sophomore year in high school. I had been in the marching band since I was a freshman and that year the band performed in Walt Disney World, which was a pretty sweet gig. Not the Main Street USA parade or anything, just a random little open-air performance in Tomorrowland, so we didn’t have to, like, spend a whole day showing up two hours early to assemble behind the scenes or anything like that. We mostly got a couple of days to go to the parks and have fun, except for a very short walk on/play a couple songs/walk off performance that justified the whole thing. I had been to Disney World with my family when I was younger, but going with my friends as a high schooler was something else.

Anyway, one evening we were at MGM Studios (which was less than a year old at the time) and roaming through a gift shop and they happened to have a comic book rack in the store. This was just a weird coincidence, as this was decades before Disney acquired Marvel. But my eyes happened to fall on this cover:

You guys. YOU. GUYS. That exact moment was the first I became aware that Marvel, after cancelling What If…? back in 1984, had brought it back. This was brand new What If…? and they were already up to issue #13, which featured my beloved X-Men. Of course I was gobsmacked, and my girlfriend took notice and said I should go ahead and buy it. That, in turn, was the exact moment I went from thinking “I’m trying to be a mature teen with a girlfriend, I probably shouldn’t obsess over comics anymore” to “maybe she wouldn’t totally object to my passion for comics?” I did buy it, I dug it, and I was newly re-interested in comics collecting.

(Also not for nothing but my parents balked a bit at the cost of this band trip to Florida so I had to save up for it some myself, which marked my entry at age 15 into the part-time workforce. Said afterschool employment continued after we got back from Disney World, as you might imagine, but now my paychecks became disposable income rather than being saved toward some specific goal. And comics were happy to eat up a good chunk of that.)

The wrinkle in all this was that What If…? was not the easiest comic to collect. The Disney World experience of stumbling across it notwithstanding, it was more of a direct market title than a newsstand title. Ugh, I will try to explain this as quickly as possible, but I lived through the retail transition which went from comics being something you would find at grocery stores or convenience stores, kept on spinner racks with no rhyme or reason whenever the store owner remembered to restock them, to comics being something you can only find at your Friendly Local Comics Shop which is dedicated primarily to comics, keeps everything organized and up to date, etc. And for a while there both of those models co-existed, and also for a while your Spider-Mans and X-Mens (and Supermans and Batmans) would be at the 7-11 pretty dependably, but your more obscure titles didn’t make the mass appeal cut as potential impulse buys, and so they had to be sought out specifically at the FLCS.

So yeah, if I wanted any more What If…? comics I would have to go to the shop, and fortunately we had one in town. But of course, once you get in the shop and you are surrounded by walls and walls of new comics plus a decent back-issue selection equivalent to what two or three dealers might bring to a show, are you just going to buy the one issue you came for? Especially when that comic only comes out once a month and maybe you go to the shop once a week or more? In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Soon enough I was regularly picking up X-Men again, and the Avengers, and other random things as they struck my fancy.

Weird side-note, around this time my little bro got deeply into Spider-Man, specifically the title Web of Spider-Man, and once again our strange sibling rivalry dynamic reared its head. X-Men and Avengers were MY thing, and therefore not his, and Spider-Man (and the FF, as it happened) were HIS thing, and therefore not mine.

I still loved Spidey, and still do to this day! And partly it came down to economic efficiency, as I certainly read plenty of the Spider-Man and FF issues my little bro brought home, and saw no need to buy my own separate copies of what he was already going after. But I do admit there were some deeper issues of territoriality at play as well.

One last random note because I have to acknowledge it: I did eventually backtrack and get the first 12 issues of What If…? (vol. 2) I had missed. In a crazy bit of timing I would discover that the issue I had just missed, in other words the issue that would have been on the stands at the gift shop if the marching band trip to Florida had been a few weeks earlier, was this one:

Which, yes, would have likely led to the exact same outcome because once again it’s an X-Men-related cover. But not just any X-Men story! It’s the EXACT FREAKING STORY from X-Men Annual #10 that I had read in TD’s room years before which sent me down the Claremont mutant misadventure rabbithole. (Also, THROG! Thunder-god Frog!) I might not have actually gotten back into comics collecting because my head might have just exploded.