Category: Nostalgiaville

Re-reading Eddie Campbell’s How To Be An Artist and After The Snooter recently — well, relatively recently — got me thinking about how surprisingly clear my memories are of formative comic buying experiences from my youth. For all that my memory is unreliable overall, which is to say, it’s a mess and in some cases almost entirely non-existent, there are certain experiences that I’ve internally mythologized to such a degree that it’s as if they happened last year, as opposed to three decades or more ago.

(I know, rationally, that this doesn’t mean that my memories are any more reliable, or even consistent; it’s almost guaranteed that what I think I’m remembering is actually more than slightly fictionalized or mis-remembered and just fueled by a sincere, misguided sense of belief and “realism.” Nonetheless, it feels real, and that’s what counts, deep down.)

When I was a kid, there was a store that my dad and I would go to every Sunday morning to buy newspapers and bread rolls; it was a weekly tradition, to go together to buy those things for that day’s lunch. The entire family would gather and eat sandwiches and read newspapers together, each of us grabbing one of a stack of papers — for some reason, on Sunday, we got five or six different papers — while the television played behind us, no-one really paying attention. The store was called “The Tuck Shop,” and I loved it not for the bread rolls or the newspapers, but because every month, they’d get a literal stack of DC comics for me to choose from, all available for relatively cheap. Before too long, I’d convince my dad to let me get one each week alongside the papers and the rolls.

When I say “a stack,” I mean that, each month, the store would get an entire month’s worth of DC releases, or thereabouts, all at once. They’d be dead stock from somewhere else, three months behind release in comic book stores, but I didn’t care. For 30 pence, I could pick up issues of Superman or Batman or Justice League of America or whatever; at times, I’d save up my own money and go in and just buy four or five at a time. I was in heaven.

I said it was “an entire month’s worth” of releases; that’s not entirely true, because the selection was unreliable and almost certainly missing at least two or three titles randomly every single time. There would always be the “big” books, but more obscure favorites would come and go without rhyme or reason, resulting in a frustratingly incomplete collection for the me I was at the time. I didn’t really care, though, because the lure of the Tuck Shop remained impossible to resist.

Sometimes I think about that shop, and how central it was not just to my weeks at the time, but to who I ended up becoming. Without the Tuck Shop, I’m not sure my comic fandom would have turned out the way it did. Without those weekly visits, without the excitement of having a literal pile of comics to pick through and find new favorites, would I be the person I am with the job I have today?

One of the things about re-buying things I owned years ago is the realization that so many of them have become genuinely expensive, rare, and treasured items in the intervening decades. Across the past few months, there have been times when I’ve gotten the idea to try and track down one particular weird thing — an issue of a comic series, say, or one specific edition of one specific book — only to find it online and think to myself, sure, I want to have it again, but there’s no way I’m going to spend that much money on that piece of pop culture trash.

It’s the flip side of whatever nostalgia wave I’m surfing, I guess; the slow acceptance that these various totems that I’ve been collecting for God knows what reason (besides, I mean, just wanting to re-read or re-hear certain things; that’s certainly part of it, if far from all of it) have value to other people as well, and seemingly more value than I’m willing to agree to. I made the reference to how much a Green Lantern comic cost the other day, but it wasn’t really a joke as much as my sincere befuddlement at the idea that people are apparently paying that much money for that particular comic.

In many cases, these are things I intentionally or unintentionally devalued in the past; I think of my teenage bedroom, a mess of comics and books and cassettes and CDs on the floor, me treating none of it with the reverence of today’s collectors. Of course, at that time it wasn’t decades old, and still easily available; I was disposable trash culture. That might be the reason for my current confusion: this stuff remains disposable trash culture for me still, purely because I lived through it. I was there, man, or whatever.

It’s 2023; it’s, what, 33 years since They Might Be Giants released Flood…? If you go back 33 years from that, you hit 1957. Imagine how arcane, how prehistoric that era felt to you back in the day. Imagine being upset that people were selling 1957’s pop culture for collector prices.

Sometimes, I think about what I left behind to move to the US.

I mean that in a literal way, instead of a metaphorical one. I’ve been thinking about the physical possessions I left behind a bunch lately, in part because I’ve been re-buying some of them from eBay across the past year or so. Not in any kind of organized, “I’m rebuilding my comic and book collection and this is my plan,” way; it is, as is my tradition, far more haphazard and unintentional than anything like that. I think we’d all expect no less.

I’m not buying everything over again, thankfully; there were no shortage of books, records, comics, and whatever I once owned that I have little desire to revisit in the slightest, never mind re-purchase. (Just remembering the tower of Empire magazines I had gives me no shortage of anxiety, as much as I long for the days of longform entertainment magazine writing.) But as I grow older and think about the mass of media that I didn’t just live through but were a fan of, I find myself wishing that I hadn’t left basically everything I’d known entirely behind when I moved continents. Couldn’t I have had a plan to keep things in storage and move them eventually…? I had a near-complete run of Deadline, for God’s sake. Do you know how expensive that kind of thing is to buy nowadays?

I left it all behind to start anew, under the impression that I wouldn’t want or need much or all of it. Looking back now, that feels like an early warning sign of how that relationship would turn out — the suggestion (as was the case for many years) that I limit any comic or book collection because it wasn’t important enough to make space for, and there were more important things to focus on.

I guess we ended on the metaphor after all; I left parts of me behind when I left all those stories and magazines and books and pages of other people’s words. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I should have been paying attention to why I was doing it, and what it would mean, years down the line.

Or maybe I’m just bitter at the price of Green Lantern Corps #201, all these years later.

What was funny about recording the last episode of Wait, What? was how not-sad I was during the whole thing. I was even aware of that in the moment, the lack of sadness and sorrow during the final recording session. I’m pretty sure I even called it out in the recording itself.

I’d certainly expected to be sad, ahead of that. It had been a running theme when talking about it in the run-up to that final recording; I’d make some kind of comment along the lines of, “oh, we’ll both be messes in the last one, we won’t know what to say,” and I meant that entirely sincerely. Even on the day of the recording itself, it weighed on me; I felt this sadness on my shoulders hours ahead of sitting down to actually do it, all too aware of it being The Last One.

The podcast, after all, had been a constant in my life for more than a decade. It was one of the few things that had survived the upheaval of 2018, when everything else in my life to that point had gone; indeed, some of the strongest memories of the initial weeks after leaving my marriage was actually talking to Jeff and recording the podcast. For a show that was, ostensibly, just two friends talking casually about comics and culture, Wait, What? had this immense importance in my personal cosmology.

Jeff was the one who suggested ending it, months earlier, expecting me to disagree. I didn’t, although it took awhile for both of us to finally, properly settle on the idea that we were actually going to go through with it. For awhile, it felt like a dare each of us was expecting the other to back away from: were we really going to do it? Was it really going to happen?

It’s a few weeks later now, and the loss hasn’t sunk in yet. The holidays happened immediately after to distract us from the muscle memory of sitting down to chat for two or three hours every Saturday evening. We’ll still be calling and chatting anyway, just without recording it, which makes the loss infinitely easier — it’s probably why I didn’t feel the sadness when recording that last episode — but nonetheless, I know something has been lost. I’ll feel it when I least expect it, I can tell.

I missed the 25th anniversary of In It For The Money, the Supergrass album, earlier this year — apparently, it was in April, now that I’ve thought about it enough to go check — but even just thinking about its release and where my life was at at the time has had me thinking over the last few days.

In April 1997, I was speeding towards the end of my BA course in art school, and filled with no small amount of panic about the fact. I had no real idea what I was going to do next — I’m sure that I must have already interviewed about continuing into a Masters degree by that point, but I almost certainly wouldn’t have known that I’d gotten in — and, equally, no real idea about what I was truly working towards with the final exhibition that was going to make up the majority of my final grade. That spring, I was in mild panic the entire time.

I was, however, still a music fan and someone who obsessively went to record stores every week to check out the new releases and see what was happening. I remember being into the first couple of singles from In It For The Money, and convinced with the confidence of someone who genuinely knows no better that the full album would be integral to getting my work done in a timely, successful manner. So, I bought it.

I can still remember the sheer panic I felt when going to the bank immediately afterwards and realizing that I’d accidentally spent the last of my money on the album, and wouldn’t be able to buy food as a result. I am, thankfully, far more financially solvent today, but I’ll never ever forget what that felt like; the sense of regret, of panic, and of suddenly being aware of the value of things. Or, more accurately, the lack of value of other things.

In It For The Money, ironically, didn’t even come close to living up to those first two singles. I should’ve bought some groceries instead.