Category: Nostalgiaville

Another comic book nostalgia story. The other week, inspired by the nostalgia (and, beyond that, simple enjoyment) of reading the big Superman omnibii, I considered buying a massive collection of another series I loved from the same era, only to take a look at the actual comic book collection and realize that I could simply complete a collection of the original comics for a fraction of the price; I did that instead, of course. What I didn’t expect when the various eBay-ed packages arrived, however, was the surreal sense memories that I’d have as I opened them.

It’s one comic in particular that set me off. I can remember buying the first issue of the 1987 Justice League (later Justice League International, later again Justice League America because there was a spin-off so the world got divided; capitalism taking its toll again back in 1989 as it did) off the stands; I was 12 at the time, by process of math, and I could tell you right now what newsagents I was at and walk right there if I was back in my hometown. I can remember, inexplicably, what it looked like in the store, and my giddy sense of excitement at picking it up and taking it home. (It was a first issue, it said so right there on the cover, that made it a big deal, right? It was the start of something, it felt important even if it’s just because it told me it was important!)

More than that, I can remember loving that comic; I re-read it over and over and over, fascinated by its off-kilter tone and references I didn’t quite get at that age and the artwork that was more photo-realistic and less dynamic than I was used to. I became obsessed with that series to the point of almost spending obscene (for me at the time) amounts of money on a rare edition to complete the set. I read that issue until it was literally falling apart; I can remember the tape that held the cover on, and how oddly guilty I felt about that at the time.

All of this flashed into my head as I unpacked this new edition of the comic. I kept looking at it in awe, as if it held some kind of magical powers, almost too nervous to even touch it; this connection to something so important to me almost four decades earlier, as if it could open a hole in time and drop me back there and then without effort.

Part of my personal mythology is the fact that it took me two attempts to get into art school when I was a teenager; I spent a year between high school and art school at community college, working in a class to make sure that the embarrassment and shame I felt not going on to art school as had been my dream for years by that point didn’t happen again. But here’s the thing; the reason I didn’t get into art school that first time wasn’t just because I wasn’t talented enough — and, in fact, I might have been talented enough all along. The reason I didn’t get into art school was also because I completely screwed up the deadline for application.

I could not, for the life of me, remember what made me check the details for art school application on the day that I did, but I do remember the utter shock and numbness that came upon realizing that the application — complete with a portfolio of finished work, and a series of submitted paperwork that I had not even started to that point — was due that very day. I remember the sense of dissociation where I told myself surely this isn’t actually what’s happening, oh no, I’ve screwed up absolutely everything by not paying enough attention and begged for the help of absolutely everyone around me to try to pull something, anything, together to submit.

What this meant in practice was that I had to fill in my part of the paperwork, get the remainder to various teachers in my high school to add their parts, and also pull together what little work I had accomplished in the past few months to make something resembling a coherent portfolio of work that would then be packaged together and taken to Glasgow — an hour or so away from where I lived — and then dropped off at the art school there, my first choice even though I knew I had almost no chance of actually getting in. In a perfect world, this would’ve taken a week or so of careful consideration on everyone’s parts, but instead we came together to hurriedly pull it out of thin air in three or four hours from first panic to leaving the portfolio in careful, if disinterested, hands in Glasgow.

I remember at the time being utterly apologetic to everyone and in disbelief that I both hadn’t known about the deadline in advance (I mean, I clearly had known about it at some point, but then forgot) and that I’d somehow, coincidentally, checked just in time to meet the deadline. I remember thinking to myself at the time, I will never be this forgetful or thoughtless about this kind of thing again, this was so stressful and horrible. That last part wasn’t true, although I’d get there eventually. When I think about how much I double- and triple-check deadlines and how anxious I get around this kind of thing now, I’m sure this is the root. It just took decades to come into its own, is all.

I suddenly remembered, the other day, something from 30 years ago. I was in my final year of my Bachelors degree at art school, and nearing the end of the course, and the world was electric. My final year of that degree was a big one for me in all kinds of ways — aside from the stress of will I get my degree or have I screwed up and wasted the last four years of my life?, there were also the facts that I spent much of the year in my first proper extended relationship (which went south before too long for reasons that were as much “I didn’t know what I was doing” than anything else; I was a bad boyfriend), I was slowly beginning to realize that maybe I wanted to be a writer instead of a graphic designer or visual artist, and I was dealing with the fact that, because it was the last year of my degree, I’d soon be saying goodbye to people I’d grown close to over the past four years and didn’t quite know how to deal with any of that.

In the middle of all of this, the music scene of the time was in flux in ways that felt exciting and explosive — part of it was that Britpop was dying although we didn’t necessarily realize it at the time, and the death throes were offering up some of the more interesting music of the movement, but there was also the truth that I was looking outside of my relatively narrow parameters of the previous few years and finding things I’d ignored or never discovered at all years prior. Added up, it felt like the perfect soundtrack to a life that felt perpetually in motion at the time.

The thing I remembered was checking my bank balance in the town center, and seeing that I had, essentially no money. I literally had just over ten pounds and I knew no money would be coming in for at least a couple of weeks, and I needed groceries and, you know, money to just get by. Instead of doing any of those things, I withdrew ten pounds and went to buy an album for myself — Supergrass‘s In It For The Money, perhaps ironically given the title — entirely secure that I was making the right decision and everything else would fall into place and be fine.

Here’s the thing: I was right. Things did fall into place, and everything was fine. And the opening three songs off that album were exactly what I needed to hear at that point in my life, and I made the right decision, at the time and even looking back now. But when I remembered all of this, the thought came to me not that I was dumb and should’ve bought food or whatever, but that I miss that utter sense of security and belief in the universe that everything would work out. Remember when you could make bargains with life like that and they’d pay off?

To this day, I can remember my first December 26th in the United States. It wasn’t just the day after spending Christmas Day at home for the first time since moving, it was also the first time I fully realized what it meant that Americans don’t do Boxing Day… a realization I came to by the fact that I found myself on a bus to work at 7am that morning, appalled and incensed at the injustice that Americans were somehow expected to just go straight back to work the day after Christmas.

As someone who’d spent more than a quarter century in the UK to that point, I understood that Christmas isn’t a one-day thing. Even for those who don’t buy into the idea — like I do — that Christmas is really all about the build up to December 25th and the season as a whole as opposed to the presents and the food and all of that, there’s a general understanding that Christmas is at least a three day event: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. You need a day after the one with the family and the presents and the food to recover; it’s entrely necessary, and suddenly, it didn’t exist anymore.

That day at work, I was sullen and sulky, there under unspoken protest. I remember so clearly that I wanted to silently go on strike because it felt inherently unfair that I was there in the first place, as if something had been taken from me by simply having to work, and feeling all too conscious of the fact that I could have taken the day off if only I’d thought to plan ahead. I was mad in the kind of scattershot, indiscriminate manner that means that I was actually mad at myself but unable to accept that, but looking back, a lot of me still thinks, sure, but in the defense of past me, why the fuck are offices open on the day after Christmas?

I’ve learned my lesson since then, and if you’re reading this when it goes live, I’m very purposefully not working. I hope your Christmas was/is a good one, if you celebrate, and if you don’t, I hope everyone has at least left you alone enough with the holiday cheer that you don’t resent it the way I resented working those many years ago.

I realized, with the slow, dull awareness that such things come to me, that I have a particular type of sense memories that only occur with stairwells — and, specifically, walking down stairwells. I couldn’t tell you why this is, what there is about the feeling of walking down a set of stairs that locks everything about the experience away in my memory when everything else from that time period becomes faded and filled with holes; I couldn’t even tell you why it’s walking down the stairs as opposed to up that seems to be the key, but it is; perhaps walking up, I find myself too aware of other things and walking down I’m concentrating on less? Who can tell how the brain works.

And yet, I can tell you exactly how it feels to walk down the backstairs into the shared basement of my first apartment in the US; how thin and claustrophobic the stairwell was, how rotted the wooden stairs were to look at, yet how solid and sturdy they felt by comparison. I can tell you how oddly comfortable the experience was, even though it meant walking past multiple other apartments’ back doors on the way down — we lived on the top floor of the building — each one potentially about to open at any minute without warning. I could talk about the shift in light of the stairwell as I reached the parts of the building blocked from natural light by everything else all around.

Or I could share the feeling of walking down the stairwell in my high school, and how nervous I was when I first started attending the school at the top of the stairs, my teenage vertigo warning me to stay away from the railing in case I somehow fell over. Each step at first being nervous about how steep they felt, hating the enormous windows the stairwell opened out onto. (I had similar nerves walking the stairwell down from the top floor in art school, years later; there was something about the design of the central stairwell in the school that felt as if all it would take would be one trip and I’d somehow cartwheel over the railing and collapse to the floor three stories down, broken bones and blood. Schools and stairwells, apparently not a good combination for me.)

Or the stairs in the house I grew up in. Or the stairs in the hotel in Paris when I was 21 on a magical weekend trip that was tragic and heartbreaking as you can only feel when you’re 21. Or the stairs in my first house in Portland, or the stairs, or the stairs, or the stairs.

It’s nice, given how unreliable the rest of my memory is, to have something so clear in there for multiple markers and areas of my life. I’ll never understand why it’s walking down stairs, but I’ll always be grateful that they’re there.

I remembered, the other day, about getting an unexpected letter from America when I was in my early 20s — 20, maybe, or perhaps 21? — and how it felt at once entirely surreal and unexpected and perfectly in tune with everything else that was happening in my life at the time.

I was finishing up my second year at art school, which had been frustrating but good for me in any number of ways I wouldn’t realize until years later; I’d become more self-sufficient after living on my own in the middle of nowhere for six months or so, and I’d started to find out who I was in terms of being a social animal as well, which is a thrilling moment for anyone of that age. Certain benchmarks were still months and years away from happening, but I finished up the year feeling like a very different person than I was when I’d started, and that was an exciting realization to have. The world felt filled with possibility.

In the midst of all of this, I’d been writing to my favorite comics of the era, because that’s what was done back in those pre-internet times. To my amazement, some of those letters had been printed and people had written to me in return, which was even more amazing. (My full address was published with each letter, because I didn’t know enough to ask them not to include it.) It felt like a connection to a world and an industry than I’d loved for years by that point, and one that had previously seemed to be separated by a magical veil that only allowed me to receive information. Now, somehow, I was sending and receiving. Again, everything felt newly possible.

One day, in the last few weeks of the school year, I got an oversized envelope that had DC Comics branding. I opened it to get a note explaining, basically, hey we saw the letters you wrote to some of those comics and we thought you might like this comic, too, give it a try and if you do like it, spread the word to your friends. There was also a black and white photocopy of an upcoming issue of Xombi, one of Milestone Media’s comics of the time.

To their credit, I did like it: it was weird and lyrical and read like the spiritual successor to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol of a handful of years earlier, but drawn by an outsider artist who was mad at the page. I started buying it, and would have spread the words had I any friends who’d be into that kind of thing. (I didn’t.)

What stuck with me more than the comic itself, though, was the idea of someone who published the comic seeing something I’d written and thinking I was worth the photocopying and postage to get this preview. I felt accidentally, undeservedly important and entirely humbled and terrified by the concept. But it fit with the everything is possible somehow feeling of the year I’d just had, and the blurring of lines between me as an audience and a participant in whatever I was reading. The boundaries became that little bit fuzzier.

Looking back, I wonder if I’d have ended up where I am now professionally (or even personally) without that letter signalling that someone, somewhere, had been paying attention and some domino in the back of my head falling over at the thought of, if it happened once, why couldn’t it happen again…?

Upon discovering my current favorite “new” podcast First Thirst — in which guests talk about their first celebrity crushes, and what if anything that says about who they are today — I found myself thinking back to the various media figures kid me had a crush on, and wondering if there was a through line. (Spoilers: there’s not, I don’t think.)

What was more surprising than anything, I think, was trying to think back to childhood celebrity crushes and struggling to think of any before when I was, say, 12 or so. I can think of precisely one — Marmalade Atkins as played by Charlotte Coleman, whom I just found out died astonishingly young at age 33, which I find surprisingly sad for someone I hadn’t given any thought to in literally decades. I daren’t look back at any video of the old Marmalade Atkins TV shows for fear of utter embarrassment and shame at whatever was going on in my 7- and 8-year-old brain at the time.

At least Marmalade was flesh-and-blood, as opposed to so many of my latter “celebrity” crushes, the majority of whom weren’t just fictional, but comic book characters: I’m enough of a cliche that of course I fell for the charms of the X-Men’s Rogue, all faux Southern accent and a bashful personality matched with bombastic body and unrealistic hair that demanded the eye’s attention whenever she appeared on the page. (I was shy too, and wished I had someone like that was real, and would notice me! Ah, the embarrassing mindset of the pubescent mess I was.) My crush on Lois Lane probably started around here, too, and that one has persisted on and off for decades; those who know why, know.

I picked up my first issue of Deadline in 1989, aged 14, and almost immediately had a crush on Pippa from Wired World, a fact that Chloe — who not only looks like Pippa but holds her up as an inspiration in multiple ways — finds endlessly amusing to this day.

In amongst all of this, though, were the non-celebrity crushes, the people I ran into in real life and pined for silently. Far more than any fictional or televisual crush, these were the figures that shaped me and my desires entirely unknowing, because I never ever came out and told them how much I liked them. To do so was to risk rejection and embarrassment, as I was all too aware of at the time. (Especially as I was far from the most charming or attractive child on the playground; some things never change.) Perhaps I should have paid more attention to all the unreal crush potential in my world at the time. They would never have rejected me; they didn’t even know I existed, after all.

I’ve been thinking about generations more lately, inspired both by Jeff Lester talking about how Generation X is only ever going to have one U.S. President it produced — Barack Obama, because everyone that followed was from the Boomer generation, and once they’re gone, the next wave will likely be Millennials — and reading a piece about Millennials and their lack of cultural footprint in the grand scheme of things.

I remember reading Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Copeland when I was in my first year of art school. At the time, even back then, it felt as if I was catching up on some big cultural touchstone that wasn’t about me and mine, but instead a historical document about That Which Had Come Before. That was back in 1993, when the book was just two years old, but the fact remains: Generation X, as a concept, felt like something that was for people older than me.

I’ve struggled with that in the years since. I get that I’m officially Generation X — I was born in 1974, and according to the internet, Generation X encompasses people born between 1965 and 1980 — but I’ve always secretly believed that I was part of some secret mid-generation that came of age in the mid-1990s and belongs between Gen X and Millennials. Is this because I’m British and Britpop ruined my cultural sensibilities to that heavy a degree? Potentially; Copeland’s Generation X feels such a particularly American book that the entire name feels like it belongs to Americans who listened to Nirvana and Pavement and not gangly, awkward British folk who liked Pulp and Blur and owned a Northern Uproar single or two. (A depressing aside: if there was that secret mid-generation for British folk my age, we’d almost certainly be called the Oasis Generation or something like that. Insert a heavy sigh here.)

I feel as if, despite talk of Gen X and Boomers, it wasn’t until Millennials started having a cultural voice that the idea of generational shift became mainstream — all of which makes it more ironic to see the argument that Millennials are the first generation to lack a cultural identity that’s unique to them, or to create music or literature or art that is wholly original and not a remix of what came before. The piece I was reading about this argued that American Millennials’ most memorable aesthetic should be described as “Lumberjackcore,” which feels at once fitting — the mustaches! The obsession with authenticity as an attainable concept that can be adopted! — and the most cruel put-down.

Generation X, by contrast, gave the world techno and raves and… is that it? Perhaps when you look at everything in this manner, it’s the finest perspective to have to fight off the common wisdom: everyone might think the Boomers were squares who ruined it for everyone else, but they were the hippies and the punks. You don’t get hip-hop if it wasn’t for the Boomers, either. Food for thought, perhaps.

I had a thought, the other day, upon realizing that a bunch of comics I’ve been buying in back issues lately aren’t ones that I collected back in the day, but ones that I read from the collection of my best friend in high school; I realized that I had inherited the issues originally when he quit reading comics himself, and I thought, back when he outgrew comics, just like everyone else at the time except for me and the other shy, painfully quiet loners I’d see at the local comic book store.

I thought that, and then I realized that… that probably doesn’t happen anymore. At some point in the decades since I was a teenager, buying and reading comics became, if not mainstream then at least not something that is a topic of open derision by your peer group. I’m almost nostalgic about the whole concept now, looking back.

I remember the point when I thought to myself, oh, I’m a comic collector now, and I can even remember the specific comic book issue when I realized that I wasn’t just reading comics off-handedly; it was something that was specifically an active interest, something that I wanted to do and do intentionally. (That was Uncanny X-Men #185, by the way, by Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr.; I don’t know why that issue was the one, but it was. It still took ten months for me to call myself a collector, though; I didn’t do that until I bought Uncanny X-Men #195.)

Throughout my late teens, I remember that buying and reading comics was a particularly solitary activity, that I’d find the stores and go there myself or drag along a friend or even family member despite their obvious disinterest. It was something that I kept to myself, as much as I’d occasionally attempt to convert people I thought could be like-minded and easily convinced. It rarely worked; for the most part, it was something I did and kept to myself.

There’s really is something I almost miss about all of that. As lonely as it was — and it was! — there was also something… exciting about feeling as if I spoke a secret language that no-one else around me understood, or the thrill of realizing that other people could understand, when that connection was made. The world is different now, where everyone doesn’t just recognize Spider-Man and Superman and Batman, but Metamorpho, Shang-Chi, and Moon Knight, as well. How did that even happen?