An unlikely, yet uncanny beginning to the journey…
I’ve been plotting to open a comic book shop since I was a teenager working at S&J Comics in Chester, NY. For a kid like me growing up in a small town, the comic shop was more than just a place to spend my leftover lunch money. It was a place between school and home that was uniquely mine. It wasn’t just the fact that very few people in my immediate circle knew anything about comics. Lord knows, I didn’t need one more odd thing to help me stick out. My 6 foot tall, big-boned frame topped by frizzy curly hair was usually enough. No, for me, the comic shop was one of the first places I ever felt a sense of equity and inclusion.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. While working at S&J Comics definitely accelerated my comic book journey (and spending), the beginning was rather unassuming.
In December of 1990, I was 12 years old. While the details are fuzzy, I can distinctly remember it was a confusing time in life. I was a chubby, curly-haired, fashion-impaired tweener in a time when “tweener” wasn’t a thing. Kids like me were still very much stuck in the 80’s caste system at school. I had a best friend who lived two doors down, and a host of bullies at school. My family was straight out “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but living in a time and place more suited for “Friday Night Lights.” Again, neither of these cultural references were a thing in 1990, for someone like me, it was a matter of navigating stereotypes rooted in “Breakfast Club” and endlessly perpetuated by “ABC Afterschool Specials.”
Then, one day I walked into the small smoke shop on Main St. to buy my usual packs of baseball cards. I know what you’re thinking…you can’t get more stereotypical 80’s small town than a smoke shop on Main St. selling baseball cards to 12-year-olds without even a second thought. That day, however, in a spinner rack of comics I had previously noticed, but never really acknowledged, there it was. Uncanny X-Men #271:
Uncanny X-Men #271, Marvel Comics, 1990. Chris Claremont (w), Jim Lee (p), Scott Williams (i), Glynis Wein (c), Lois Buhalis/Tom Orzechowski (l)
Now, Uncanny X-Men #271 won’t light up many “Best of…” lists or rate as a “Key” in comic collector parlance. It was released in December, 1990 and contained the middle portion of a crossover story that was running through Marvel’s X-books at the time. It was drawn by one of the hottest, up-and-coming artists in comics, Jim Lee, featuring Wolverine, one of the most iconic comic characters ever created. These were all details I knew nothing about at the time. While I had come across comic books in passing at grocery stores and libraries, and even had a couple discarded ones thrown away by high schoolers that my dad, a high school custodian, would bring home as a curiosity, I had never truly embraced them. This chubby kid still had dreams of being the next Sid Fernandez, pitching for the Mets and someday having my own baseball card that other chubby kids would find packaged with a rock-hard piece of chewing gum at their local smoke shop.
Yet something about this cover, about the time I encountered it, and the story within, burned a neural pathway straight from my optic nerve, through my frontal cortex, and directly into my amygdala. It was a rare instance when one’s executive function meets their lizard brain and harmony is created, as opposed to the usual resistance between old and new information. In my hands lay the gateway to a world, an entire universe, where there are mutants who don’t manifest their powers until puberty, and when they do, they’re feared and hated for who they are. Despite this, they train, they fight, they love, and they die in the pursuit of acceptance and equality. Add in civil rights allegory, political discourse, diversity of characters, and challenging vocabulary, and I found a world light years ahead and removed from the day-to-day drudgery of my small-town life.
And they weren’t the only ones in this vast multiverse of word balloons and pictures doled out monthly in 20 some-odd page chapters on flimsy newsprint paper. There were world-devouring villains and heroes with real-world problems. Teams of heroes fighting to save the world from intergalactic threats, while anti-heros fought the underworld to save everyday people on the streets. Spandex-clad men and women with unattainable anatomy contorting into impossible poses and ordinary folks attaining abilities and succeeding against seemingly impossible odds. It wasn’t all high-concept or Shakespearean quality, but it was mine. For those 10-15 minutes I spent with each comic, everything else would melt away.
Cue my made-for-TV biopic, where you see a montage of me learning to draw comics during every waking hour, daydreaming of heroes and villains I would create, and eventually building up the courage to submit my own work to Marvel Comics as a college freshman, despite vowing to fulfill my immigrant parents’ dream of becoming a doctor. And honestly, this would be a pretty accurate documentary to that point in my life.
Then, without realizing it at the time, a nexus event in my multiverse occurred….
image shot at Ara Ha