comics

Worlds lived. Worlds died. I was never the same.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #12. Cover by George Perez

In the (imho, highly overrated) film Garden State, Natalie Portman hands Zach Braff her headphones and tells him, “You gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your life, I swear.”  She’s referring to The Shins, a band I’ve had little to no interest in ever since I first heard of them, so I can’t exactly say that she’s right.  Then again, I’m too old to have one song “change my life.”  But I’m sure that there’s some song out there that at one point or another did change my life. 

I can’t think of one right now because as much as I love music, I don’t know if a three-minute rock song is as earth-shattering as, say, a book.  And I know that we all have that one book that we picked up, read, absorbed, and were ultimately changed  by.  To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye … there’s a long list of books on a standard high school curriculum that offer that chance.  But what if the book that changed your life wasn’t a piece of literature?  What if it was a comic book?  And what if it was a comic book that wasn’t Watchmen or Dark Knight?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Crisis on Infinite Earths:  the comic series that changed my life.

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Up, Up, and Away!

Superman: The Secet Years #1

I honestly don’t remember when I bought my first comic book or what that comic was.  I have vague memories of perusing the magazine rack at Greaves stationary in my hometown and coming home with an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man or Superman.  At some point, I know that I got an issue of the Batman team-up title The Brave and the Bold sometime in the very early 1980s, so that might have been it.  But Superman: The Secret Years #2 was the very first comic book that I remember buying at an actual comic book store.

Amazing Comics, which is on Gillette Avenue in Sayville, NY, opened in the fall of 1984 next to an iron-on T-shirt store named The Special-T, which is where my friends and I procured most of our wardrobe.  I am sure that I was at the Special-T buying a birthday present for someone when my dad noticed that there was a brand-new comic book store in the next building (it had previously been a junk/antique store, I believe).  It was and still is an extremely small store with barely any room to move; in fact, I think if you fit more than six people in there, you’re exceeding maximum occupancy.  But at seven years old, an entire room filled with comic books blew my mind.  Who knew that you could sell them on your own and not off a rack located between the cigarettes and the pens and pencils? (more…)

Where Legends Live

When I heard that Dick Giordano died the other day, my first reaction was, “Oh, that’s sad,” which is I guess what you’d say when anyone dies.  But then I got to thinking about who he was and the impact he had on my life as a reader of comics.

For those who don’t have more than a passing knowledge of comic books, Dick Giordano was an artist and editor at DC Comics  in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.  His most important role during that time was as DC’s executive editor/editor-in-chief, which means that he was the second-in-command at the company, working just below its publisher, Jeanette, Khan.  So, he more or less shaped DC for the better part of two or three decades.  He was, in a way, DC’s Stan Lee, as just like Stan wrote a column in the “Bullpen Bulletins” that were found in each Marvel comic, Dick wrote “Meanwhile …” a regular feature in those of Marvel’s “Distinguished Competition.”

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