Angst In My Pangst

Don’t we all have this wonderful knack of biting off more than we can chew? I was trying to relate to myself why I like comics so much, and what my feelings are about comics and after sometime I found out I had started writing an autobiographical account of a fanboy tat would take far too long to finish, but which I would love to show to anyone who asks me – “Why comics, man?” And yes, I will do it in chunks, to avoid boring myself to death.

I am a comic-freak. I moan, I whine and I try to know everything about what’s happening in the comic-industry right now. Unfortunately for me, the kind of comics I like are not the ones I have read so far. I read interviews of writers who have brought out spiffy titles, and I drool over preview pages of covers, whatever is available over the ‘Net. But no, I haven’t read the actual comics themselves……mostly because these kind of titles do not have a market here in India. From what I have gathered, they do not have too much of a market even in the US ( Japan seems to be the only country that has a burgeoning comic-industry, the whole manga-wave and all ) – the usual gripe being that “comics are for kids”. Well, the usual cliched response is – “Comics are no longer kid-stuff”. Even more cliched is the line – “comics are cool“. People don’t go and buy books or see movies or play computer games because they are labelled cool. More than often, it’s just the content. The curiousity value. The hype.

My loud complaint stems from the fact that I don’t get the kind of books I want to read. When I was a kid in Guwahati, and starved of reading-material, I would make do with anything I got. Any book, any author. Maybe I was lucky enough – I had a coupe of nice relatives who had extremely…ummm…..extreme literary tastes, and they introduced me to some good things in life. (Or maybe mine was a mind more malleable than others’ ) Richard Gordon, Douglas Adams, Robert E Howard, and (snicker snicker) a guy named Ted Mark. Mad Magazine. For these, I remain indebted to Babuwa to this day. Just for the record, Babuwa was the same guy who made a 10-year old Beatzo sit through an hour of the Pink Floyd: Live in Pompeii video. For a 10-year old impressionable kid, brought up to strains of John-Johny-Janardan and Awara Hoon, a loud video ( I can still remember my heart pounding along with the bass drum ) can be traumatic, I assure you. Of course, I wasn’t exactly drooling and rolling my eyes at the end of it, but to this day, I shudder and go rigid whenever someone plays Floyd in my immediate vicinity.

Em-ahem. Enough deep, dark secrets. On with the ramble.

Right. Apart from these, Babuwa also gave me something interesting and oddball. A 1986 comic with a buggy-looking critter sitting in a Christmas stocking and saying “Happy Hannukah” on the cover. It’s name was the Ambush Bug: Stocking Stuffer. I didn’t read it when I got it first. ( Note: I still have this irritating habit, further compounded by psasidhar‘s habit of doing the same, of “storing” a readable thing for as long as I can, without reading it. The pleasure of a first read is something else, really, and the experience has to be something special altogether. 33Man thinks my basic line of reasoning is a flawed one – “read, read, read, because there is always moreto be read” is his motto in life, but, ah, his wasn’t a childhood bereft of good reading material, I believe he stayed adjacent to the University library, the university where his father worked, to be precise )
Mainly because the artwork was…..ahem…a little too extreme for my taste. None of the “clean” Superman-Batman stuff that I usually read, whenever I had the time. A lot cartoony, pretty dark, jagged lines – found out that the artist’s name was Keith Giffen. (The “clean” style of artwork that I had been used to so far was that of people like Curt Swan.

Anyway, I read Ambush Bug. Laughed over it a lot. And I tentatively started buying DC Comics which featured Ambush Bug. There were not too many of them available, but comics were more or less still to be found in Guwahatian book stores in the early 90’s. My parents had no complaints about my buying comics, they read (somewhat) and appreciated (majorly!) the small collection of Mad magazines I had. But more than Ambush Bug, the character, I was interested in Keith Giffen’s work. I found that he was also a writer, and had done quite a lot of work for DC comics, including a hilarious take on the JLA and JLI in the late-eighties/early-90’s. One of the early issues I read was a 90-page Justice League Quarterly, ( again, with story by Giffen and JM DeMatteis and artwork by…ummm, I forget who…) Blue Beetle, superhero with a perrenial weight problem switches on some gizmo that makes the JLAers, or rather, some of them, turn into micro-editions of themselves. Think “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”. he story involved a long and complicated trip through time and inside a dog ( Guy Gardner, the ex-Green-Lantern-with-attitude manages to get himself swallowed by a dog, and later comes out as part of dog-poo-poo). Why I remember this particular issue of JLI is not just because of the story, though. It’s because in the pages, I found something I hadn’t seen before – a catalogue that jotted down prices of comics.

Wheee. Prices! My comics were actually worth something. I went to the shelf that contained my 30-odd comics (i hadn’t started calling it a “collection” yet) and crosschecked issue numbers and titles. Nope, not too much money to be made here. But there was this trend I observed when I pored through the catalogue by candlelight. ( yeah, i remember that night well. I was supposed to be studying, and the lights went off, and instead of doing sums by candlelight, I decided to check out comics instead. )
(a) All first issues are worth more than other issues.
(b) Names like (Lee) and (Moore) and (Lobo app) and (Wolv app) that didn’t make sense to me against a book automatically increased its price.

By the time the lights came on, I was in a tizzy. Some of these comics, that were listed as 25$ and above, I remembered having seen them in the stalls. That was it – my chance to make money!!! I knew issues like Detective comics 27 were sold for huge prices, but I never imagined contemporary comics would sell for so high before, say, twenty-thirty years were over.

Needless to say, before the year was through, most of the bookshop-owners, who previously knew the kid that “hung around the store peering through comics” soon started calling me by name. I was a regular buyer, you see…..even though I had this irritating habit of rejecting more than I accepted, I bought with a vengeance.

This kind of kickstarted the first-phase of my comic-book “career”. I was in it for the money! And since there weren’t too many people who actually bought comics in the same spirit, I had a monopoly!

Thus ends the first Book of The Beatzian Comic Chronicles.

Just while writing this and googling at the same time, I came across this nice site, that actually allows you to read issues of comics, and classic comics at that. psasidhar, you always wanted to read the first issue of Spiderman, right? This page has it, and also the first appearances of Superman and Batman. The stories and artwork are pretty cheesy, but I think you would still like them.