I recently had the pleasantly unsettling experience of having something transform right in front of me. You know the feeling: you have a relationship with something that you think you understand, that you have at some point arranged into your personal constellation of likes, hatreds, indifferences, and then an anvil drops--BANG!--right out of the blue. When the cartoon birds (yellow, generally, and accompanied by stars) have cleared, you realize that you were mistaken in your complacency, that you have just gotten on a thrill ride without noticing.
As a friend of mine puts it, there's nothing like those few moments between indifference and the realization that something is your favorite.
I think this is why I was never really a comics person. I tried. I flirted with Tintin, at first because my best friend read them and later because my mom thought they might help me with my French. I read Sandman in high school and picked at a few Alan Moore titles. I had fun, I mostly enjoyed them, but I wasn't converted. I approached comics with prescriptions: oh, Megan, you really should read Maus. It's a cultural touchstone, a masterpiece. Everyone says so.
Prescriptions do not engender love, though they're quite good at making you feel guilty for not finding it.
Off to the comic bookstore I went, all dewy-eyed and aflutter with enthusiasm. There's very little that I find as bewitching as enthusiasm, either in myself or other people, and when it's freshly burning, I want to bury myself in it and talk to people who know more than I do so I can throw on matches, kindling, gasoline. I decided I would ask a question, something provocative enough to flush out conversation. Something like, what is the comic that changed your life? Slightly ridiculous, maybe, but the answers I got were fascinating, little stories about tectonic shifts in people's brains.
Brian Hibbs, the owner of Comix Experience, San Francisco's oldest comic bookstore with continuous ownership and location, told me about the first comic he can clearly remember. "It was an issue of Justice League of America, a Christmas story, and the weirdest thing I had ever read. The back of the book had a whole bunch of reprints from the 1940s and here were these characters that had the same names as the characters I knew, but they all had different costumes, and I didn't really understand what was going on, but they clearly looked old and had a long history… and that excited me. Here was a whole world that was really large, as opposed to just a story. I demanded that my mom take me into Manhattan, to an actual comic bookstore, and she took me to this place called The Bat Cave. It was underneath another storefront and it had, I swear to God, stalactites and stalagmites in it, around the racks. But, the coolest thing ever was to see a store that sold nothing but comic books." And that, he thinks, is the very first thing that set him on the road to owning a comic bookstore himself, to being "one of the rare people who gets to wake up every day and be extraordinarily thankful that I get to go to work."
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By Megan Kurashige