I'm writing for the comics audience here, and assuming that those of you reading have a love for the form to begin with. If not, it's your loss and you probably won't find anything of value on this blog.
While I remember reading comics and watching superhero cartoons as a very small child--I particularly remember having an Aquaman action figure I was very fond of at about five and a handful of issues of a late '80s Captain America run that I re-read over and over--it wasn't until after I'd had a hiatus from reading them, that I truly found my place in comics.
When I was in middle school, I didn't have a great many friends. As such, any time I wasn't spending with my two younger brothers I spent with the small number of people at school with whom I was close. One of those--my friend Jonathan Bidwell--still figures prominently in my life, but for the most part they've moved on to other things. One such friend was a guy I'll just call Joe. Now, it was 1992 and we were 12 or 13 years old. It was getting to the end of summer vacation, as I recall, and we were up until all hours of the night at his house (his father had left and his mother was a third-shift nurse, so we were basically watching ourselves whenever I spent the night there). Joe and I were watching the 11 o'clock news when a story came on--featuring some truly ugly critters drawn by Jon Bogdanove--to say that DC Comics had announced the forthcoming death of Superman.
Having been a fan of other characters, liked the Batman movie of the late '80s and never really getting into Superman, I remember very distinctly sitting in the bedroom at Joe's and thinking, "I gotta see that character die!" It was really just one of those mean-spirited teenage boy things, inspired by a desire to see bad things happen to a (too-) good character more than anything else. It began a love affair with comics that has now lasted almost two decades, and my admiration for the way the stories were carried off (by Roger Stern, Tom Grummett and Dan Jurgens, among others) was so impressive that I followed the series until they were all gone, and have continued to follow Jurgens' career for years after.
As a result of getting on board with mainstream American superhero comics at that time, of course, I've got a unique perspective. While there's a healthy amount of hate for the '90s out there, much of it justified, there are a lot of perfectly good comics that get painted with a broad brush. On top of that, we're now in the throes of a period in comics history where everything that happened between 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths and 2004's Identity Crisis. It means that all the character and plot development that I followed for the ten years that most engaged me in mainstream superhero comics and the soap-operatic universes they create for their characters...well, it doesn't "count" anymore. And that's kinda irritating. That's what's got me writing this column.
Next time: The Fastest Man Alive.
