I stopped reading comic books.

The first one was Iron Man #208. My Dad bought it for me in July 1986, one the same month my sister was born. I think he gave it to me so I wouldn’t feel left out of all the attention being given to my new baby sister.

I remember him telling me, “Iron Man was one of my favorites.” At five years old, he could have told me he liked for the Dodgers and I would have liked the Dodgers. Apin’ the old man, as it were.

The cover of that comic is a raspberry bubblegum blue sky with three missiles soaring out towards the reader. Iron Man is flying alongside, right arm outstretched as to reach the missile closest to him. In the bottom right, a box reads IF IRON MAN CAN’T CATCH THESE MISSILES, IT’S THE DEATH OF A NATION!, with the last four words in dramatic orange text. It’s a fun cover but I remember nothing of the story inside. For all purposes concerned, Iron Man doesn’t stop the missiles and a nation I didn’t know about beforehand was wiped off the face of the earth. 


If #208 planted the first seed, what really got me hooked on comics came about four years later. Paul, a family friend, having sifted through his collection to secure the ones that might be worth something, handed off the ‘chaff’ to me. How could I not be damned from that point, a nine-year old given over two hundred worn and well read comics from the late sixties to early eighties?

From age ten to fourteen, it was the comic boom of the early nineties. There were two comic shops in the nearby mall and the local grocery store in my podunk Adirondack mountain town even had a revolving magazine rack. Getting a comic wasn’t that hard back then. I didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but I usually had a few dollars for an issue or two each month. My best friend at the time, a kid named David, was an avid collector. What I didn’t get, he got and let me read so I was caught up on all the big summer events. Sleeping over at his place on the weekends, our time was spent between reading the latest issues and playing video games. Typical nerd kid events. Fun times, though. 

My interests in comics were waning at the time David moved away, but the loss of the main comic partner I had at the time definitely put the lid on box and shoved the comics in the corner of my bedroom closet for three years. With the addition of a driver’s license, I was able to discover my immediate area and in my travels, I found out where the last comic shop in the North Country had holed up. ‘Fantastic Planet,’ back when it was located on Oak Street; it still remains one of the best stores I’ve ever been to. With an upgrade of my first part-time job, I was able to get into the more mature themed comics that I missed out the first time around.

I started collecting trade paperbacks. What used to be a single issue purchase, $2.99 at age thirteen, was now costing me about twenty bucks a visit. When I went away to college in Central Pennsylvania, I located ‘The Comics Castle,’ a hodgepodge of old issues ran by the personification of ‘middle-age comic book nerd.’ I didn’t work the first year of school but found a part-time job as a sophomore delivering food from the on-campus grill to the doors. By that time, I had a car and I was getting heavier into music. Comics were still a part of my expenses but now I had to cover for gas and CDs.

In 2001, when I moved home to finish my degree, I started to work full time at a twenty-four hour gas station. The increased income allowed me to get back to buying trade paperbacks.  For the next two years, I would stop in Fantastic Planet every Wednesday, the day when new comics come out, to pick up what single issue series I was following (there were few) and pick up the next trade paperback in whatever series I was reading at the time. I tried to keep up when I moved down to Albany after finishing school in 2003.

But in early 2004, I stopped.

But not really. At an average of 19.99 a pop, there’s a good four to five hundred dollars worth of books sitting in my closet right now. That’s not boasting how much they might be worth to a collector. That’s how much was spent in purchasing that collection. It’s not even that big. I had forgone superhero books by the time I started college, my tastes shifting more to alternative comics. No capes. No secret identities. So I was only buying trades of these other-kinds of comic books. If I had stuck with superhero books, my library could have easily been tripled in size by the time I quit.

It’s an expensive habit. So it makes sense that from 2005 to 2006, I simply stopped buying comics and relied on the Internet. Instead of purchasing collections, I paid my electric bill and downloaded them from the internet. I read what I wouldn’t normally pay for since I got it from free. I kept up with the major Summer Events, the huge earth shattering crisis that involves every superhero. On recommendations I read online, I had gotten back into capes and superheroes. Even though I wasn’t purchasing them, I was still reading comics.

In 2006, I stopped. For real.

I’ve been back to Fantastic Planet once, to stop by and say hi and I picked up ‘Fun Home’ by Alison Bechdel because it was being sold for cheap at my University’s bookstore as required reading for a Contemporary English Lit course. But I consider myself done. Of course, like an alcoholic, there’s always the risk of relapsing.

An epiphany didn’t come and there isn’t a specific moment I can point that stopped my interest. It was a gradual decline.  The way to sell a comic book is to keep the reader’s mind in a static state, and while the ideal reader asks “Oh my god, what’s next,” I asked, “How will it end?” And comics don’t end. There’s no finish line to a character, jus a pause between story-arcs. As a reader, you are constantly running to keep up.

Finality is rare in comics that are produced by the two major houses of Marvel and DC. Unless it’s a short-term series or something completely creator run, the superheroes involved will continue on for years, decades if they’re popular, always passed to a new writing/drawing team. Characters will die, be reborn and in between, experience all possible extents of a character. Death is but a soft vacation from overexposure.

With comics, there is no gratitude for emotional investment from the reader. Prolonged exposure to mainstream comic book storytelling can leave a person jaded. That’s why the stereotype of the comic book nerd is crusted with cynicism. They have been burnt and heart-broken by trusted brands over and over again.

By the time I quit the first time, I had been buying trade paperbacks of series that had ended or were going to end. These were creator owned and operated pieces, writers and artists who maintained control over their work. There was a guarantee that the ride was going to come to an end. It might be a long trip that gets convoluted but the ride would come to an end. The players in the story were granted the dignity of a final curtain. It’s a grace that Clark Kent won’t ever get. Peter Parker or Diana Prince won’t get a chance to grow old or retire. They exist in a perpetual state of the present. No happy endings here; just a ‘To be continued next month’ at the end of every issue.

I had run out of trades to collect. I was treading over old ground, and ended up downloading scans of single issues for something to do. Standard superhero fare. I don’t know how I don’t know when, I don’t know over what issue or what character made me, but I simply decided that I was tired of comics. I, nor anyone, should read comic books as just a way to kill some time. It’s fruitless when it gets to that point of distraction. Yes, there would always be another issue to get, another appearance by this character. But it just becomes an endless chase. There would never be a sunset to walk into. Another alternate reality. Another earth shattering crisis. I didn’t have the energy to keep up anymore.

I stopped reading comics because I was no longer that Jason of five or fifteen or twenty years old.

Comic books are great entertainment supplements. They give something to look forward to every Wednesday. And for sprinting minds that can devour stimulation at a hyperactive speed, comic books are one of the more ideal forms of entertainment out there. Superheroes are fantastic things when you’re young and have a wild imagination. But they’re only a few pages deep. When I needed something a little bit more, they weren’t a suitable supplement. I was stuck with a bad case of vitamin deficiency.

My case, I don’t think, is the norm and shouldn’t be used to judge anyone. As each person’s metabolism is different, each comic book reader has his or her own reason for continuing or quitting to read. And what a person chooses to do, to either walk into the local shop or to pass it by, is neither good nor bad. There will always be comic books and always be people who read them. But for me, my time of radioactive spiders, exploding homeworlds and dark knights has come to an end.