By Flodo Span
Like most of us have at one time or another I had the recent displeasure of finding myself flat out broke. Bills were coming in red, the car needed servicing, blah, blah, blah…You get the picture. As I said, we’ve all been there. Something had to give and unfortunately that something was life’s little luxury known as my weekly pull list. To be fair, my pull wasn’t extravagant by many peoples standards (geek people at any rate). I was picking up about twenty-five books a month plus the odd graphic novel here and there and an occasional digital if something grabbed my eye. Mostly though it was printed monthlies from my LCS. When life hit the fan I cut the monthly pull down to no more than eight or nine books including, of course, my four cherished Lantern titles. Larfleeze, I’m sorry to say, didn’t even make the cut. For a GL completist like myself that hurt!
Faced with this sudden gap in my reading output I became listless quite quickly. Comic books are my escape from the daily hum-drum. A fantasy land that I can climb into for half an hour and put life’s pressures behind me. So it wasn’t long before I had worn a track pacing the carpet and wondering what to do with my newly found self-inflicted spare time. It was then that I realised there was light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve been collecting comics on and off for about twenty years and in that time I have amassed a fair sized collection. I spent the first ten years mostly combing the back-issues bins picking up the comics from my childhood that I’d missed first time around. Now I don’t know about you but I store my comic boxes in a cupboard out of the way and as a result I don’t actually revisit them very often. Trades and graphic novels are on a bookshelf and have been taken down and read many times but my single issues mostly get read once or twice at best before being tucked away never to see the light of day for many a long year.
So with great enthusiasm I left my thinning carpet and clambered the stairs to the storage cupboard at the top of the house. Heaving down the dusty old unlabelled short-boxes (I prefer them to long-boxes because they shove into dark corners more easily) I realised I was in possession of a poor man’s treasure trove. I’d read some of these books so long ago that I’d practically forgotten about their existence. I could have been reading some stories for the first time for all the recollection I had of them, while others felt like I was being reunited with long lost friends.
Grant Morrison’s run on JLA included Darkseids return in the Rock of Ages
Grant Morrison’s run on JLA was a particular highlight. I’m not a great fan of Morrison’s more recent work but his Justice League line-up is THE preeminent super-team as far as I’m concerned. He may have had to deal with Superman unexpectedly turning into an energy being early in the run but he managed to hold on to most of his heavy hitters, as well as showing an understanding of Plastic Man’s true potential that hasn’t been emulated before or since.
Another one I pulled out was War of the Lanterns which was the last big Green Lantern event before the New 52 reboot of the DC universe. I recall this was largely considered to be underwhelming at the time of publication. I enjoyed it myself but it didn’t have a great impact on me despite the loss of fan favourite Mogo, the planetary GL. Two years further on and this time around the crossover has taken on a much greater significance. It is packed full of nuances and foreshadowings that passed me by on first reading.
I spent a very enjoyable week reminding myself why Lobo was such a runaway success in the 90s. I own virtually all of the original mini-series’ from Giffen, Bisley and co. as well as most of Alan Grant’s subsequent ongoing series and it was a lot of fun to tuck into the slipstream of The Main Man’s spacehog (a customised Spazfrag666 if you’re asking) as he smashed and crashed his way across the galaxy.
One of favourite comic book genres is the alternative universe stories found, for example, in DC’s Elseworlds series. I’ve spent time with Robin 3000, and with Kyle Rayner battling gangs on the mean streets of old New York. I cheered along to a strapping blacksmith called Kal in his medieval battles with the evil Baron Luthor. In a fit of nostalgia I read all six issues of Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier in one sitting and was immediately compelled to seek out and devour my collected edition of James Robinson’s equally wonderful The Golden Age.
Super Kal prepares to smite Baron Luthor in this classic Elseworlds tale.
And before you start thinking it’s only DC Comics who feature in my back catalogue (although let’s face it, it mostly is) there where a few Marvel books that caught my attention as well. I revisited the first ten or twelve issues of New Avengers before turning my attention to my extensive Punisher collection. The Punisher was the first ‘superhero’ I was seriously into. I’m aware Frank Castle is neither super, nor very much of a hero in the traditional sense but that is what I loved most about him. Punisher comics were my gateway drug. They should have come with a warning, “Reading this comic could lead to cape addiction”. My own slippery slope went Punisher (non-powered hero), even more Punisher (still a non-powered hero), Batman (non-powered hero with a cape), and finally Green Lantern (hero with super-powers on a cosmic scale) (no cape!). As a result my oldest boxes contain a plethora of dog-eared War Journal and the like.
I also came across a mini-series I’ve never heard of but apparently own all four issues of nevertheless. It was called Sabretooth: Open Season and it was pretty good actually. A bit of a different spin on the villain’s story. Just odd that I’d never seen it before…
The other thing I’ve been getting a kick out of is reading some of the one-shots that I’ve pulled at various times. I am a total sucker for a ‘done-in-one’ comic. I’ll happily pay extra for the certainty of an immediate pay-off. And once I’d stacked a few such tidbids up on the reading pile I could gorge on a veritable smorgasbord superhero action. The worlds of Daredevil, The Flash and Supergirl all merged into one dreamlike state as I read late into the night.
I’ve decided my ‘Rip Hunter-esque’ journey through the years with comic books should continue even if I ever do manage to sort my finances out again. I’ve been having a great trip down that wormhole called Memory Lane and I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t do it sooner. I spent a heck of a lot of money on comics in my time and it seems ridiculous that I have, for all intents and purposes, been treating them as single use products. So if you’re in the same boat as me where cash is a little tight at the beginning of a new year, I can’t recommend highly enough that you dive into your storage boxes and reacquaint yourself with a few of your own forgotten friends. I guarantee you won’t regret it.
(That said, if your wallet is feeling uncomfortably light but you can’t live without brand new comics in your life I’m sure you’ll be able to find a money-stretching bargain or two at Inter-Comics to sate your appetite – for medicinal purposes only, of course)!
For more Green Lantern reviews, news and thoughts you can follow Flodo on his website flodospage.blogspot.co.uk or on Twitter at @GL875
Posted on January 10th, 2014
Category: FLODO'S TALE, NEWS & VIEWS
Tags: Back Issues, Comic Reviews, Elseworlds, Flodo's Tale, Grant Morrison, JLA, Superman Kal