All I Ever Wanted....

Compadres!

Sorry for such a long time between missives! I have been—or, actually, still am—on vacation, but I’m now done with the part of the vacation that was all about traveling around and living out of suitcases and bringing along the laptop but at no real time or point opening up the laptop.

Now that I have a few days before I return to work, and the laptop is now open, I figure I can catch you up on what’s going on. Or, alternately, maybe even write a few shorter pieces and schedule them for later? You know, that professional thing professionals do—by which I mainly but not exclusively mean Graeme—I keep telling myself I should do?

We’ll see how it goes. As I’ve mentioned on here, one way I seem to derail my plans is by talking about them here, and there is the factor of (I think) writing and scheduling posts works best when the posts themselves are not long, and I’m the kind of guy who finds myself 3k words into a post before I know it…and at that point, I don’t want to write another post, I just want to go take a nap.

(also, a very weird “oh, I know what I wanted to write about but then I got distracted so I don’t anymore”—I really do hate how much Twitter was the perfect platform for me and my limited attention span for talking about stuff.)

Anyway! The trip.

We took Amtrak from Emeryville (SF Bay Area) to Denver, then spent three nights in Denver for shenanigans with Edi’s family. Then we reboarded Amtrak for another night to go to Chicago, then spent five nights in Chicago, then reboarded the train for two nights to get home.

Apologies are owed to Todd Allen in Iowa, who I wanted to send a creepy email to saying, “guess who’s in your state?” but didn’t (in part because Todd once sent me pictures of my backyard and trying to make me think he was in my state, and it’s very hard to beat the creepiness in that. I really had to cede the creepy crown to Todd.) and to David Wolkin, who lives just outside Chicago now and with whom I was totally all, “David, let’s get together when I’m out in Chicago,” and then did nothing—literally nothing—to contact him.

Sorry, Todd and David! I think you both are pretty understanding types, and know how much I swing through my extrovert/introvert phases to take offense, and now that I value your friendship. But after so many days either with Edi, Edi’s close family, Edi’s distant family, and/or passive/aggressive Amtrak porters talking on the eve of the debate about how Trump was sharper than Biden—in retrospect, defintely not the dumbest thing the porter said or went on to say but still among the most annoying—I just needed more time as close to alone as possible.

The few times on the trip I found that solitude was, perhaps unsurprisingly, at comic book stores. In both Chicago and Denver, I got a bit of time to escape into the stacks.

Oddly, it sounds like I’m making excuses when they’re not needed—”I only go to the comic book stores for the solitude” sounds like a weirdo nerd version of “I only read Playboy for the articles”—but the weird fact is, since switching my comic reading to digital, the idea of going to a comic book store for the comic books really is the least of reasons for me now. Apart from the solitude, the feeling of escape, I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels like they haven’t really seen a city until they’ve visited the comic shops. The shops are rarely in the heart of the city (unless they’ve been there long before the city became a tourist destination), so it requires a bit of searching, a bit of traveling. Even if looking for them is now as easy as opening up the Yelp app, you still need to look.

Having said all that, as our train pulled into Denver I realized the town comic book shop in this case was Mile High Comics and that I’d accidentally stumbled onto the path of a religious pilgrimage. MHC was a constant in the comics of my youth, double page spreads listing recent back issues for affordable prices and mythical books at almost/kinda/sorta affordable prices if maybe an unknown aunt were to die and leave me just a little money.

So, on the day before the shenanigans, I caught a Lyft over to Jason Street, the location of the Mile High Comics “mega store,” snapped a few pictures of the exterior on my phone, took a few deep breaths, and plunged in.

As the photos in the link show, the “mega store” is not a hyperbolic term. It’s like being in the largest dealer room in one of the largest comic book conventions you could ever attend: but it’s just you, three comic book clerks, and maybe a dozen other people wandering around in a space that would put an airplane hanger to shame.

When I was in Japan, the excellent Cormac O’Connor escorted Edi and I to Mandarake in Shibuya City, an astounding experience, where the accretion of tankobon, toys, doujinishi, videotapes, boxes of old Shonen Jumps, viewmaster reels, model kits assembled and unassembled—along with so much more—had formed something larger than the sum of its many parts. It was literally the embodiment of dreams, a physical structure built from—and bearing the weight of—a culture’s history and desires.

I didn’t think I’d really come across its like again, but wandering innumerable aisles at Mile High, I had little choice but to admit I had.

After a certain point of success—and it seems impossible to deny that Mile High Comics and its owner Chuck Rozanski had hit that level of success decades ago—a thing develops its own specific form of gravity, drawing others to it. There were action figure playsets I’d never seen, Super Powers figures I never thought had been made, Aurora Monster model sets lined on a shelf, slowly sloughing the sagging original cardboard of their boxes.

And comic books, of course. Probably something like 120 longboxes of unsorted, unbagged comics at the price of $50 for 20 (7 for $20, or $3.95 a pop); quite possibly double that for the sorted and bagged; plus a separate section of CGC graded books nestled safely in wood-paneled cabinets; and of course true rarities slabbed and staring at you from the walls, the color and vigor of their covers barely diminished by the obviousness of their captivity.

It couldn’t help but feel different from Mandarake. In Manadarake, I was a visitor to a country I could appreciate but not fully understand. In Mile High Comics, despite being an accidental pilgrim, I nevertheless stood in a place not unlike Heaven: for in Heaven, it seems to me the line between interiority and exteriority must be erased—that line being simultaneously the body and time—and there in Mile High Comics, the repository of nearly every childish desire I’d ever had, the inside of what had once been my head and heart were now outside me, the past and the present the same. Equivalent.

And yet, in the way the idea of Heaven boils away as you age, as any conception of how its actual mechanics could work sags and sheds (just like those Aurora Monster model kits!), I too had boiled away enough of my desire to be mostly unmoved.

At the forty-five minute mark, I knew I’d have to tithe—buy something—and knowing that gave me the freedom to wander far and wide looking for it, but what that thing would be, I couldn’t quite conceive. I found a few issues of Atari Force, checked and re-checked their prices, put them away, returned (after having learned their yellow price tags meant they were 40% off as part of that month’s sale), and walked away again.

(Once I’d talked myself out of buying them at the higher price, it was strangely even easier to talk them out of buying them at the lower price. I suppose it makes sense comic book stores mount their most valuable issues on walls like the heads of animals at a game preserve—the comic book store best serves hunters, those who arrive with their want lists in hand, with a childhood they could use their checkbook and credit card to extend, a collection crying to be completed. The meanderers and perambulators aren’t served nearly as well.)

Back in the far corner—though not a “true” corner, as huge blocks of the 22,000 foot space were set off for employees—there were scattered volumes of manga, alphabetized by title. And set off in the corner of that corner was a small endcap of Japanese language manga, tankobon marked at ten dollars each.

(Those of you wondering how much harder it might’ve been for me to shirk my childhood if only it’d been more affordable are welcome to join me in doing so.)

I walked away with a single volume that looked a lot like the volume of Crying Freeman I’d just reread on the train, but clearly wasn’t. Instead, it was Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami’s Wounded Man, a pre-Freeman collaboration that ran for three years in the Eighties, and which some manga fans in the States still talk about as a holy grail of grimy exploitation. (ComicsOne managed to translate and publish at least five of the nine volumes back in the early 2000s before being suddenly wiped from the Earth like the Nazis at the end of Raiders, perhaps for a similar crime of beholding what should not be beheld.)

It’s up to you to decide if my inner life had grown from childhood into sleazy adulthood, or if I’d only purchased the most portable item in the store I was actually interested in.

But either way, I made my way to the counter (altar), paid (tithed), and left (left).

Oof, I’m knackered! Let’s leave off here and we’ll see later if I have anything equally portentious to say about Graham Crackers Comics in Chicago.

(I hope so, if only because I love the idea of trying to bloviate solemnly while using a phrase like Graham Crackers Comics?)

(But, spoilers: I won’t.)

Man, already a third of the way through July! Ain’t that a thing? I hope the summer is treating you well.

-Jeff