Kind of like what I saw here, throughout the store, between the X-Men long boxes and oversized Treasury Editions of Superman vs. Shazam, Conan, Ghosts. One whole window of the store was dedicated to glass bongs, the genie bottles I’d spotted earlier, but the deadhead detritus didn’t end there. Next to posters of Killraven and the Identity Crisis saga hung several examples of Roger Dean cover album art. Yes, it said, breathe deep and follow us to a land of floating, fragmented islands, alien bonsai trees, mud-dobber castles where mosquito spacecraft explore the secret seas. A long glass counter along the far wall contained both classic Big Little Books and hand-crafted clay pipes. Another wall championed what looked like entire runs of various ’50s TV-tie-in series, interspersed with Fritz the Cat and Zapped comics. Black light lit the aisles of the store not already illuminated by strobes or disco or plasma balls. A few dark nooks glowed only with lava shadows, posters with slogans for Panama Red or Zig Zag rolling papers.
Back in the day, I didn’t develop my dad’s thoroughgoing zeal for the comics cavalcade, for saddle-stitch storytelling, but I did collect for a while. I still have a few of the rarer ones he bought me over the years mounted in my office. But Dad loved the medium from his first Action to his last Sandman. I may have moved on, but the love of my father, my desire to have some connection to him, particularly after the Alzheimer’s set in, demanded I keep one foot in the art of antiquity and one in the world of word balloons. Consequently, part of me both loves and hates what stage and screen have become. Comic book characters, comic book plots, comic book themes. All the great drama fleeing from Broadway to boob tube, cineplex to idiot box. But since I grew up with Kirby and Ditko, Doctor Strange and Adam Strange, all the new gods, I live in a kind of perpetual schizophrenic state.
Walking the length of the store, checking the center aisle boxes occasionally for titles I might recognize, I was glad of the warmth, I was glad for safe haven, but I wondered how a store so brazenly counter-culture still existed in a state like Oklahoma. After my BA, before I moved to Southern Cal for grad school, I holed up in Kansas for a while. Further north, less inbred, but not so different. There, in Wichita, for almost two years, the police regularly raided a woman’s house who lived just down the block from me. She sold pot paraphernalia, yes, but it was advertised otherwise. Bongs were “decorative bowls.” Roach stones were “beads.” Clay pipes were “native American art.” They busted her anyway.
Okay, it ain’t Kansas, but how the hell does this store stay afloat? How do they keep the Securitate at bay?
Sure, I’d smoked dope in my day. Still did if the company was right, but it wasn’t any more a major part of my life than the comics I abandoned when I moved out. I left both forms of escape behind. Or so I thought. Trying to encourage attendance at plays, the literate drama so few care about these days, I feel like I’m re-labeling theater the way my neighborhood pot lady did her wares. Oh, Death of a Salesman is really The Dark Knight Returns. Angels in America is just a grittier version of X-Men II. How often have I sold my soul? How horribly have I co-opted both myself and my father?
To thine own self be true.
No. I have to love the world I hate…for my father’s sake. When he introduced me to my first comic shop in Norman, it was as if he were preparing me for baptism or the priesthood. “This reminds me of when I bought that original Submariner story,” he said, “‘Motion Picture Funnies Weekly’.” He went on to show me around, introducing heroes and villains, legendary leagues and shady subcultures which seemed to bleed into much of what else the store sold. Doing his best to shield me from all the head shop shit, all the underground udders on display, he revealed to me at least an inkling of the real reverence he felt.
I still hadn’t seen any sign of life in the shop. My feet had stopped burning from the cold, my hands had stopped tingling, but my spider sense was going off like a goddamn carillon as I finally felt warm enough to start seriously rifling through the store’s wares. I still had two tequila tinies. One more might make things make sense. So, yeah, then there was one.
The first title I came across was a 1972 DC Treasury Edition of The Adventures of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I always loved the oversized comics. They made me feel bigger somehow. This one in particular. I remembered reading it on the way back from Christmas Eve with my relatives in Carnegie when I was eight or nine. My folks had been fighting a lot and the simple stories and games calmed me, took me away.
Most comics in a store are bagged, but often the larger sizes are left to the careful discretion of the customer. I gently opened the pages and saw the blocky, funny-animal style I remembered. The grid lines of the sequential art. The word balloons. My mother’s hand in dot-matrix color and basic black outline reaching under the Christmas tree to retrieve a small box labeled “wife.” The next panel zoomed out to show the tree itself, a sad, silver little thing made of tin. The kind of tree that would’ve made Linus cry. Another panel clearly illuminated the halfmelted fairy perched atop, its wand drooping, the bulb inside flickering. Two more panels down, next to an ad for art classes, the adults exchanged gifts while my sisters and I waited with feigned patience, enraptured by the moving fan-light which bathed the silver tree in amber and emerald, blue and scarlet as the color wheel turned.
For minutes I simply turned pages and read the story of that Christmas as a normal continuation of memories I’d been channeling since I walked in. The small box opening. My mother’s reaction. “But Julian, I didn’t think we were…not this year.” The words, sad as our tree, fragile as that melted fairy, appeared in a word balloon above her head. But the moment I read my father’s response in his parallel balloon—“Just three little words, that’s all I want”—I snapped out of my fugue and realized something was happening. Something surreal. Frightening even.
This wasn’t Rudolph. This wasn’t a comic book story. It was my story. My dad’s story. How the fuck…
I flipped pages, skipped to the end, rolodexed back to the beginning. Not one image of the rhinophymic reindeer. Not one caricature of the obese, capitalist God who kept his sentient pets in bondage. Just my family, that whole Christmas. The words my folks spoke. The presents we received. The complete confusion on my father’s face as my mother shut the box with her new wedding ring guard, set it aside, and focused on me and my sisters. The slump in his spine, in his whole soul, as he shrank into the bedroom and let us finish our consumer orgy. In a sequence of final panels, after a crossword puzzle full of terms related specifically to our family (mule skinner, Oklahoma, adultery, art school, drama teacher, disappointment), the comic zeroed in on my father’s hands pressed against his face as he sat on the bed. Slightly different, scalloped balloons showed his inner thoughts.
“I should have explained. Really. But what are we gonna tell them? I keep thinking, Regan’s getting hitched in June, maybe the whole wedding thing, daughter leaving, new lives twining will bring back…But what if it doesn’t? She fucked around, probably still…”
I couldn’t read it all. Didn’t want to. It was like the Twilight Zone, like reading a Borges story. Maybe meeting your dead father on the battlements of a castle you never wanted to inherit. It was impossible.