a life in pictures

It seems that comics have always been a part of my personal history.  I have been drawing as a long as I could hold a pencil and mixture of art and story that I found in comic books always appealed to me.  Like so many other things, my comic reading was a pool of the high and the low, the good and the bad, the resonant and the silly.  I came of age in the eighties with reprinted collections of Spider-man, Batman, Superman, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, Dracula,etc.  I didn't have a sense of continuity at that point and all were collections that I obtained from Superior's Public Library.  I read the pages of the same issues over and over again.  At some point I became aware that new stories were being printed and I'd pick them up from the grocery store magazine rack or, if I was lucky, we'd stop at Globe News and I'd get to go into the annex dedicated to comic books (both new issues and the back issues).  I still followed the same characters and added some based on what I could afford and what looked cool (there was a series called Solo Avengers that for a long time featured Hawkeye in a story in the first half and other characters in the second).  My brother and I both read G.I.-Joe for a long time too.  The artwork for the most part was the main draw for me, watching these stories unfold (if I just wanted to read a story I could go to any of the number of books that I owned--Point thrillers were big for me during elementary school, Stephen King and such filtered into my life during Junior High).

As I got older I thought I was getting more sophisticated in my tastes, but that was only marginally the case.  I was collecting.  I had my Death of Superman (#75 in black polybag)and my X-Men #1 (all 5 covers).  I was finding some cool stuff, but by this point it was the 1990s and Rob Liefield and Todd McFarlene pretty much had a stranglehold on style.  All new teams had at least one guy who looked like Wolverine and one who looked like a weird mash-up of Gambit and the Punisher.  There was a "hyper-realistic" style going on with lots of line shading and veins detailed into arms--but of course, most artists coming up were following either McFarlene's cartoonish proportions or Liefeld's complete lack of skill in drawing period.  During this time prices kept going up too.  I kept just justifying comics to myself during this period, but I still hadn't discovered any of the titles that I would later love and which would form a cornerstone of my support and continued belief in the form (believe it or not, I had not heard of Neil Gaiman at this point).  We're now in the mid-90's and one story-arch in my go to book kicked me out of comics for a lot of years:  Maximum Clonage in the Spider-man titles.  That was it.  I kept drawing and kept painting and held on to the nostalgic love of the characters, but I wouldn't buy another comic book for about eight years.

I graduated from college in 2002 and the comic book movies were in full swing with Spider-man and X-men getting into their sequel.  I rediscovered comics via graphic novels at Barnes and Noble.  I fell in love with Daredevil, Sandman, Alan Moore's stuff, and others.  I found the storytelling that I'd been looking for and not finding years earlier (regardless of how I wanted to believe that I had).  Now I keep up the best I can with what's new.  I read as much as I can, if not after I've purchased it, then in the bookstore.  I still draw.  I still paint.  I still love the high and the low.  And I still won't touch a book that Rob Liefeld had anything to do with--I have no idea how he has a career as a comics artist, he's awful!