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The last comic book I bought was the last issue of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise. It seemed meant: I started reading SiP in the 90s when I was an undergrad at UofT and I was about to go off to grad school. I thought it was a sign. And SiP was the very last of the great 1990s comic book series that had drawn me to comic books and kept me reading and defending the medium despite the constant ebb and flow in the quality of the super hero genre books that are the bread and butter of the industry - back then, a month at the comic shop meant all the X-Men and Batman titles, maybe a Superman or thrown in for variety, but the grist for my imaginative mill cam from Sandman, Milligan's Shade the Changing Man, Ennis' iconic run on Hellblazer, and SiP (among others I've long since forgot, thrown away or chucked in the recycling).
I thought I'd miss it, reading comics, I really did.
Not so much.
These days, I check the comic sites like a retiree checks out the trade journals - with polite but distant interest in something that had once been a large part of my life. Oh, the sexism and the gender issues and the general shit quality of 95 per cent of the stuff put out by the big two still gets me hot under the collar. But that's about it, really. It's like I've lost something only to discover I didn't need it.
It's a strange, nostalgic feeling, not regretting giving up something you once loved, like searching for the hole in your gum left by a lost tooth only to find it's filled in unnoticed. An appetite that rather than be sated, has disappeared altogether.
It is, I've decided, distinctly odd and new in my experience.
I thought I'd miss it, reading comics, I really did.
Not so much.
These days, I check the comic sites like a retiree checks out the trade journals - with polite but distant interest in something that had once been a large part of my life. Oh, the sexism and the gender issues and the general shit quality of 95 per cent of the stuff put out by the big two still gets me hot under the collar. But that's about it, really. It's like I've lost something only to discover I didn't need it.
It's a strange, nostalgic feeling, not regretting giving up something you once loved, like searching for the hole in your gum left by a lost tooth only to find it's filled in unnoticed. An appetite that rather than be sated, has disappeared altogether.
It is, I've decided, distinctly odd and new in my experience.
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