Crisis of Inifinte Youth

Last night she said, "Look at you... you're a big bundle of nerd."

I'm in the process of returning to the halcyon days of my youth, I think. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis. Comics and I go back as far as I remember.

I first consciously started collecting in the early 80's. Spiderman and X-Men, which soon progressed into just about every other comic Marvel published at the time. I shied away from DC, confounded by the continuity, though I picked up some issues of Swamp Thing around the time of the Wes Craven movie. Of course Crisis of Infinite Earths changed all that, and I was soon buying as much as my allowance could afford.

I think my enthusiasm for comics waned towards the beginning of the 90's. I dropped my sacred X-Men sometime after the Fall of the Mutants storyline. For the most part, the mainstream wasn't speaking to me anymore. I retreated into my Vertigo and independents for a while, found myself going down to the comics shop less and less as the creators I followed retired or left the medium entirely.

Identity Crisis brought me back. Maybe I was looking for an excuse to get back in, or maybe the story was compelling enough to bring me back, or both. Slowly, my active interest in the medium has been rekindled.

So last night I hit a kind of critical mass. Last December I received an iPod, and have lately discovered podcasts. My nerd interests converged as I tried to articulate some thought about the way comics were evolving. I had been listening to a compilation of interviews about the upcoming 52. It seems to me that Dan Didio is running the show closer to the television/movie model. He's creating a more collaborative atmosphere between the creators, it seems, as opposed to the old editorial fiefdoms that used to exist. I think that is showing through on some of the OYL titles that have been coming out. There's a much stronger sense of cohesiveness between the titles.

At this point, my girlfriend made the above observation, and I realized that I was indeed back in. This blog, I guess, is reserved for those moments: Observations, reviews, fond memories... which is probably nothing special, but to quote Homer from The Springfield Connection, "They saw a crowded marketplace and thought, me too!"