Trumblog

Remember when you were a kid with a few coins, not enough to go see Star Wars again or the latest knock off that was trying to fleece you of your hard earned lawn mowing or car washing bucks?  So you schlep down to the corner store or 7-11 looking for some way to satisfy the hole being burned in your pocket by those quarters and dimes.  Gum or candy might do it, but comic books were better.  You could re-read them (Bazooka Joe is the only gum that came with reading material and even at 7 I knew those jokes were tired and old), you could share them so that for the price of one you got access to hundreds from your friends Michael Specter, Michael Sharkey and Judd Young (I know you weren’t friends with them, but I’m sure that you had friends of your own back then and can insert their names).  Then there was the post reading analysis and fantasy play and finally there was swapping (2 Scooby Doos for a Swamp Thing?).  Now the same can all be said about Star Wars trading cards, which I was really into and still have a pretty good size collection of, but I was also game for a Star Wars comic book to see what Han Solo was up to between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Personally I wasn’t into the super hero’s so much.  I liked the super natural tales and teams like the Avengers, the Defenders, and the X-Men.

I write all this because today, May 1, 2010 is Free Comic Book Day, an event held every year to celebrate comic books and drive Gen X’ers like me who have drifted away from comic books, aside from re-reading Watchmen and watching just about every Marvel-derived film in the last 10 years, back to the comic book shop dragging our bewildered sons and daughters with us.

Go, support your local comic book shop (finding a participating store is easy), check out the merchandise, get a hit of the sense memory from the smell of the news print, pick up your free book and buy a second or third so that you can do some swapping and maybe even a pack of Star Wars trading cards if they still make them.  I hope that they do and that they haven’t gotten rid of the bad gum that came with them like Topps did with the baseball cards.  Talk about a sense memory.

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