If it hadn’t been for one little thing, 2010 would’ve been a good year for us. Work went well, was very rewarding both financially and in its own right and in turn this meant some of the low grade money problems we had been having ever since we first bought our house finally disappeared. A bit materialistic perhaps, but even Dickens knew happiness in a capitalist society depends on money in the bank. But of course there was that little thing of S. and her ongoing medical problems, having spent most of the year in hospital due to complications upon complications emerging from her kidney transplant. At the moment she’s still in hospital, recovering from a second operation done to repair some of the damage of the first (more or less). She’s on the mend, but not yet home and there have been many ups and downs on the way, perhaps more to come. At times it all was a bit too much for me, but luckily there was always an escape mechanism nearby to help lose myself for some time.
Comix.
Or did y’all think it was just a whim that made me pull a dumb stunt like reading fifty Marvel Essentials in fifty days?
Comix, especially fat compilations of not especially good seventies or sixties Marvel superhero comics, are very good fodder to suppress your emotions with. They require much less effort to read than even simple novels and as with every collection of serialised material, there’s enough repetition and recapping to get the gist of a story even when reading it next to a bed in the ICU waiting for your partner to finally wake up again…
It only occured to me a few days ago that this escapism is why I went back into comix in such a big way this year; I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Yet through all the years me and S. have been together, from when we first met back in December 2000 up until last year, I never cared much for comics, despite having been a serious collector for thirteen years before that. Not that I got a girlfriend and dropped comics, rather that I quit comics in disgust in June or July 2000, had just gotten sick of them, sick of wasting money, sick of the scene and dropped out completely, from one day on to the next, just stopped buying them. It’s only then that S. appeared — which may be coincidence, or it may not.
But it’s no coincidence that I started collecting again once she wasn’t around. Comics may or may not make you fat but they are a solitary hobby. Despite the camaradie of the comics shop, the conventions or the blogs, in the end you still end up reading them on your own, absorbed in the four colour wonders on offer. True, reading books is the same, but the difference between the two is that you can get through so much more of the former than you can get through the latter. So if you got the bug, you need to spent more time and money buying your fix, especially back when the primary delivery mechanism was the 32 page pamphlet. You’d go to the shop, get your pile of comics and spent a couple of hours plowing through them: the ideal hobby for a lonely by preference kid like me.
And now when the loneliness wasn’t by choice comix were there again…