Comics

I spent most of the morning putting a set of books — actually, a half-dozen sets of books — up for sale on eBay. They're reprints of old comic books, most from the 1960s (the comics that were reprinted, not the books), and I'm selling them so I can replace them with — well, it's sort of difficult to explain. I'm selling them in order to replace them with new versions of the same material that have far better reproduction. And yes, it really does matter. (It’d take too long to explain why, but it really does matter.)

These are the comics I grew up reading (in books and in reprints, many years after the fact), and they left an indelible impression on me. I came to them at just the right time, at the age when you begin to choose your own pop culture. Everything is new (and even if it isn't, you don't know any better), you consume it relentlessly, and good or bad, it somehow stays with you forever. This, for me, is the stuff that forged a lifelong interest in comics, and there's never, ever been anything better.

My seven-year-old was instantly, almost magnetically attracted to these books when I took them down from the shelf to be dusted — that’s the way this stuff should work. (I’ve been trying to remember how old I was when I first discovered comics.) I’ve promised him we'll share this treasure soon.