By: Eric Michael Anderson
It’s all the public library’s fault, you see. My parents would routinely take me to the public library as a child so I could check out books to read. When I was in the third grade in Ames, Iowa, my main reading interest was Hardy Boys mysteries. But one day, in the Ames Public Library, I came upon a large wall-mounted rack (I believe it was in the Children’s section) covered in comic books. Prior to that day, I had never paid much mind to comic books, but that day I found one that intrigued me: Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. At the time, Marvel Comics had a line aimed at younger kids called Star Comics, and Spider-Ham was that line’s flagship title. I checked out the comic, thoroughly enjoyed it, and began using my allowance to buy issues of Spider-Ham that I would find on the spinner racks in the grocery store or drug store. And through the funny-animal versions of the Marvel Universe depicted in Spider-Ham, I became interested in the mainstream Marvel Universe as well.
The next comic to catch my fancy that I checked out from the library was The West Coast Avengers. It was the “West Coast” in the title that got me. I was from the West Coast, land of oceans and mountains, serving an involuntary penance in flat, landlocked central Iowa, so a superhero team from the West Coast. . . well, they must be super-cool! The West Coast Avengers quickly became my favorite comic, and from there I spun off to other Avengers-related titles (by the way, my dad always insisted that I check out two “real books” as well as my comic books).
By fourth grade, I had learned to bag my comics, keep them in order alphabetically by title and, within a title, numerically by issue. My must-read list grew to include the four X-Men titles being published at the time: Uncanny X-Men, Classic X-Men (which reprinted older Uncanny X-Men stories), X-Factor, and the New Mutants, as well as The Punisher and whatever random special or mini-series Marvel was putting out at the time.
My fascination with comics would continue (and my collection would continue to grow) until the middle of eighth grade when two things happened: I wanted to buy an electric guitar, so I stopped buying comic books in order to save my money towards my rock & roll dreams, and I just kind of lost interest in the whole comic book thing, anyway. Interestingly, in retrospect, it’s generally accepted by people who write about such things that there was a drop in the quality of comic books being published in the early 1990s, which is when I quit buying. So I guess it wasn’t just me.
Sometime in high school, I started to have that comic book itch again, but having fallen thoroughly into the indie-rock scene, I had a general interest in things outside the mainstream. At that point I wasn’t terribly interested in reconnecting with my childhood loves, the Avengers and the X-Men (also, there seemed to be twenty-odd different X-Men titles being published at the time, so I wouldn’t have even know where to start). I asked an artist friend (and fellow rocker) to recommend some “weird” comics, and he pointed me towards The Maxx and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I enjoyed those and would pick up the occasional issue, as well as some random indie comics, but when I headed off to college my comic reading dropped to nil again.
Until my senior year, that is. I had started college intending to go into musical composition, but ultimately found myself an English major. As such, I was fascinated with different methods of story-telling, and decided to check in on those great stories of my youth, the comic books. So I found myself routinely going to O’Leary’s books in Lakewood, WA, catching up with the X-Men, Batman, and related spin-offs. Also, at the time I was on the staff for the university’s “social justice” magazine, and had an interest in body issues and sexism and media portrayals and so forth, so to “research an article” I also bought the worst offenders in the absurdly-busty, barely-clothed, super-powered-female niche, which meant a lot of things published by Chaos! Comics and Image Comics. Some of it was crap, but there are some great Witchblade stories, and Lady Death had some cool stories, too (these days I will just admit that I like super-powered chicks with big boobs and not try to couch my interest in some “let’s fix the world” agenda. Ah, the joys of not being an undergrad anymore).
About a year later, having graduated from college, I moved to Louisiana, and ended up serving in AmeriCorps at below minimum wage ($700/month if I recall correctly), I realized I really couldn’t afford this comic habit of mine and gave it up cold turkey.
And then, about a year after that, a wonderful thing happened: I went to my local public library, and discovered, to my great joy, that they had comic books! They were collected in trade paperbacks and graphic novels, rather than individual issues, but that was actually an improvement, because then you could get a whole storyline at once, and they held up better, physically. I took great joy in checking these wonders out from the library (though I did feel mildly insulted, being twenty-odd years old, that they were all shelved in the “Teen” section). The public library has been my main means of reading comics ever since.
I do still buy the occasional comic though, and it’s a good thing: by attending the Wizard World comic book convention in Chicago in August of 2007 (and dropping my big pile of purchases), I met my soon-to-be wife. All thanks, in the grand scheme, to the Ames, Iowa Public Library.
