comic book confidential

When I was a boy, a friend of my mother's brought over a big box of super-hero comic books for my brother and I.  My brother, two years younger than I, was casually interested (most kids couldn't resist the bright primary colors and the action of comics back then) but I was hooked.  I still remember going through the slightly musty cardboard box (my mother's friend had found the comics in a used book store in, I believe, San Francisco) and being enthralled.
 
I took an immediate liking to the glorious "80 Page Giants"...squarebound and full of wondrous tales from days gone by...though, of course, they were all new to me...that were published by DC Comics (then known as National Periodical Publications...not that that's really important here but just go with it...)  Batman and Robin, Green Lantern, The Flash, the Justice League of America, the Legion of Super-Heroes (how cool was that? 25 kids...kids not much older than me at the time...with super-powers saving the universe on a regular basis), and, of course, Superman and his family of characters (you don't have to be a comic book fan to know Lois Lane, Supergirl, or Jimmy Olsen.)
 
I was hooked and that particular addiction lingers...unabashedly...even to this day.  I've always loved to read and comic books were just part of a ongoing series of things that caught my reader's eye, heart, and mind.  Comics opened the door to exploring science fiction and Greek mythology (I still remember a big book of myths filled with wild and wonderful stories and drawings of the gods looking very much like...yes...super-heroes) and on to the myriad subjects and genre which vied for my reading time then and vie for it now (as the burgeoning stack of books on my nightstand surely attests to.)
 
Once a month my local UPS guys delivers a box full of new comics and I get lost...if not quite a child again something as close to that initial feeling of wonderment as I can manage in my cynical dotage.
 
Come Friday I'll be returning to the San Diego Comic-Con, one of the largest of these affairs in the world (made moreso perhaps by the success of big budget movies...the studio folks up the road in L.A. come down to hawk their wares and be seen more and more), and mingling with others who understand the feeling, to one extent or another, of finding a little magic in a flimsy brightly colored pamphlets.  I haven't been to the Con in years (not since I ended my nearly decade long adventure in comic book retailing...a story for another day) and I'm looking forward to the sheer manic, gaudy, senses shattering (thanks, Stan :-) energy of the place.  It will be cool...for a day anyway (one gets to a point, or more precisely an age, where you only take so many fanatics, salesmen, too-cool-for-the-room artists, and funky costumes on grownups who should have known better.)
 
Excelsior, true believers :-)