Nothing Ever Really Dies

I still remember the first comic book I bought myself*: X-Men No. 248 from 1989, Jim Lee's first penciling duty on the title. I pulled it from the creaky rotating comics rack at Brant Smoke & Gift, on Brant Street. I was eleven years old.

I started my comics collection by piling each new issue I bought, sans bag and board, next to my writing desk on my bedroom floor. After a few months, one pile became two, then three, and eventually I knew I had to find a better way to protect my collection. I wanted to make sure my comics didn't get ruined so that I couldn't read them anymore; they were so fragile. At the same time, other kids were collecting comics too, but rather than having any interest in the stories contained in the books they purchased, they bought them as an investment** and kept them sealed in poly bags, usually without reading them -- you know, because that would "break the spine" and devalue the book***. Every little fucker, myself included, was convinced that issue whatever of Doctor Strange or Deathlok was going to be the next Detective Comics #27.

Kids are so fucking stupid.

During my adolescence and into adulthood, I would fall in and out of love with collecting comic books. But I never stopped loving the stories.

---- ------

I don't remember the first horror movie I watched. I do remember watching a shit ton of them, mostly slasher movies, as an elementary school kid, usually at sleepovers. I can tell you exactly where and when I watched a certain movie over my entire lifetime****, but I can't tell you what the first horror movie I watched was. This is weird to me.

I bought the Friday the 13th Part III novelization from the paperback rack at Brant Smoke & Gift when I was eleven. I went home with it and hid it under my bed because I felt like I'd committed a crime. I was young and had an interest in fiction wherein people are murdered, brutally. At that age, curiosity so often feels criminal.

Kids are so fucking stupid.

As an adult, I've watched fewer horror films than I did when I was younger. Maybe because real life is scarier than anything cinema can offer.

Kids are so fucking tasty with Frank's RedHot...

* not the first one I read. My uncle would regularly buy me comics -- Daredevil, The New Mutants, a really great one-shot in which The Thing fights a scaled wrestler that eventually turns into an alligator -- when my family would visit Nova Scotia in the summer. I N C E P T I O N

** Sell your Bitcoins now!

*** The comic book industry, realizing this new dynamic in its customers, went on to exploit its younger -- or dumber -- collectors who wanted to both preserve issues and read them by releasing issues wrapped in their own plastic bags. Buy one to read, another to save! And, hey, each bag has 1 of 7 collectible cards! Buy one bag to save, buy another to get a card! #kompugacha

**** Seriously. Test me.