Highway 62

I'd read comics pretty steadily for about 14 years, from 1980 to about 1994. And really, it was a good time to be getting into comics. You had a selection of cheap back issues from prime 70s Marvel insanity, books like X-MEN and DAREDEVIL were firing on all cylinders, there was a steady stream of smaller publishers offering interesting alternatives to the market. And oh yeah, this guy named Alan Moore started making waves over in the US by about 1985, with everything that followed (both good and bad.) By the end of the eighties, there was crazy batshit experimentalism in the mainstream (Bill Sienkiewicz on ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, Miller's page layouts on DKR, oldschool formalism so crystalline and perfect it became radical with WATCHMEN, Bissete, Veitch and Totleben rewriting the rules of grid layouts in SWAMP THING, Kent Williams and John Muth and Dave McKean all hitting hard by the end of the decade.)

So yeah, a great time to be reading comics. Until about 1994 or so, when I just sorta gave up. I continued on reading SANDMAN, which I'd been reading since the first issue and occasionally picked up the odd interesting book at SDCC, like Paul Pope's THB, for instance. By that time, I was busy teaching myself guitar, meddling in online music fandom, still writing novels and finally taking up a career in animation, which pretty much destroyed any free time I had. Comics fell by the wayside, and I hadn't found too much by 1999 other than HELLBOY to generate enough interest on my part to take time out and drag myself to a comic store.

In 2000, I found myself back at SDCC and I remember wandering the aisles, more out of habit than anything else, and then I stopped at the RED STAR's booth, intrigued by their Soviet-inspired designs and fusion of 3D and 2D artwork. I was unemployed at the time and looking for work in my field (though not extensively, as I had a baby on the way and knew that my time would not be my own in short order.) I talked with the crew about possible openings for modellers and Goss seemed interested in my 3D portfolio, but it never extended past that. I picked up the collections of THE RED STAR anyways and enjoyed them a great deal. About that time, I grabbed the collection of FROM HELL as well. I remembered reading the first couple chapters as they had come out and wanted to know how things turned out.

Over the following year or so, I picked up a few odd collections of old stuff and single issues here and there, but wasn't a regular at a comic store. There was still an awful lot of dreck on the shelves that just screamed "run away!" at me.

I'd also started writing again at the time, but sort of aimlessly, having accepted the fact that getting back into animation wasn't going to be possible with me wanting to raise my own children at the same time. Not gonna happen. Not enough hours in the day.

And then in 2002 or so, I was stopped in my tracks at the local comic store by a comic cover that seemed as if it had precisely zero business being on the shelf of a comic store. That was THE FILTH #1. Its sterile, industrial design was so unornamented and bold that it demanded attention. Of course, I wasn't expecting what lay in wait on those pages.

The clerk there said "Yeah, that guy's writing NEW X-MEN now."

This guy is writing X-MEN, I thought to myself? I gotta read this. I hadn't put together that he'd also written ARKHAM ASYLUM (which I'd read for the art) and the odd issues of DOOM PATROL that I'd read (and mostly forgotten.)

So I picked up his first NEW X-MEN collection as well. And well was my mind truly blown. I'd given up on the X-Men ages ago, and had only read them as long as I had out of inertia. They'd become caricatures (and maybe they always were, but at least they were compelling caricatures for a time) of themselves and had nothing for me.

Then I jumped back in with both feet, snapping up new stuff like SLEEPER and older collections of THE NEW GODS and LUTHER ARKWRIGHT and some of the ESSENTIALS volumes (that first Dr. Strange and the Howard the Duck volumes are outstanding and you're missing out if you haven't grabbed 'em.) DC was coming out of a longish slumber (HUSH was just coming out, and while it's not a good story, it marks a turning point for them) and Marvel was throwing things at the wall to see what would stick.

Then I got back into online fandom, having skipped out on USEnet discussion of comics since about 1994. It was refreshing to talk intellgently about comics instead of just ducking my head and paying the clerk at the comic store while the regulars talked about...well the stuff they liked to talk about.

From there it was a hop, skip and a jump (thanks to Graeme) to writing a regular column about comics at Broken Frontier. Yeah, I became a fan again by becoming a critic, to some degree. But then that was a step along the way to becoming a creator. Though the two things are utterly different, and just because you're good at one doesn't mean you'll be good at the other. Of course, I was a lousy critic...

More than you wanted to know, I'm sure.