3:AM Magazine

By Mark Czanik.

I was thirty-nine when I first began having the dream. Night time in the city. I am in a dark alleyway, looking out towards the street, and skyscrapers. Rain sparks off the paving stones. A single solitary figure dressed in a yellow jacket and blue jeans is walking away from me, a teenager with his shoulders slumped dejectedly. Strangely, he is not wearing any socks. Behind him, draped over a dustbin in the shadows, is a blue and red costume, the facemask melting like a Dali clock. There’s an upended wine bottle in the foreground. Cigarette butts and a book of matches. A red glove. In the dream I am watching the retreating figure from the point of view of someone crouched behind the dustbin. The discarded costume is so close I could almost reach out and touch it.
I knew this image well. It was from a drawing by John Romita of Peter Parker, and the costume belonged to Spider-Man. As a boy this image, which occupied a whole page of the comic, had a tremendous effect on me. It was like a death scene, really, the way he had turned his back on his gift and cast his secret identity away like that. He had threatened to do so before, of course, but this was the first time he had actually gone ahead and done it. It was from issue #50 of Amazing Spider-Man, although I couldn’t remember the title of the story, or exactly why he had committed this terrible act of abdication. Once, I would have been able to check up on these details easily enough from the massive collection of Marvel titles I kept stowed away under my bed, all neatly stored in cardboard boxes and catalogued on a checklist I was forever updating on my sister’s typewriter. More than likely, I would have known it from memory. But I didn’t have a comic collection anymore. Twenty years earlier, I had sold them for a pittance. Those I couldn’t sell – the British reprints mainly, which were worthless, ‘just paper’ I was told by one heartless dealer – I had taken down to the recycling bin and dropped inside.
Over a decade’s passion gone in an instant.
It’s a tale many collectors can tell. Most learn to live with it, are liberated by the letting go of childish things and move on to more serious, adult preoccupations. You can’t stay a kid forever. Some, though, never quite get over the loss, the sense of having betrayed something dear to them. In my case, by the time I went to see Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film in 2002 (forced to sneak in alone because my daughter was not yet old enough to provide me with a decent alibi for being there), I was having my Dali facemask dream two or three times a week. That film was the last straw. Leaving the cinema, I made the decision to start buying back my collection. Say, the first hundred Amazing Spider-Man to start off.
The next day I went through the phonebook in search of comic shops. To my amazement, I discovered there was actually one in Bath, the town where I lived. On Walcott Street. A street I must have walked up and down thousands of times. Surely there was some mistake? Yet when I went to investigate there it was, the sandwich board sign propped up outside the door: American Dream Comics. I climbed the stairs. The stairway was a gallery of familiar characters from my boyhood: the Incredible Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, that unforgettable cover from the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man no amount of time could dim. I stepped into a small room. A single window that didn’t seem to let in a lot of light. A few shifty looking middle-aged men standing about, a bit pale faced and shabbily dressed. A defunct pinball machine. Seedy looking place. I might even have turned and walked right back out were it not for that unmistakable inky-sweet smell of old comics that instantly made me feel at home.
There were rows and rows of them crammed upright in wooden boxes. Some of the older, more valuable ones were pinned up on display. When I asked the owner whether he had any Amazing Spider-Man comics earlier than issue #100, however, he all but laughed at me. ‘Those are silver age you’re talking about. Pre early seventies. They’re antiques,’ he said. The earliest he had in stock were near-mint copies from his own collection he had been selling off: issues #157, with Dr Octopus, and #152 featuring the Shocker. He showed me. Although I recognised the covers, they were much smaller than I remembered (or was it that my hands were just bigger?), and each comic was now sealed away in a dustproof cellophane bag with a cardboard backing to prevent creasing. I’d never been quite so precious about my own collection, often reading my favourites over and over until they began falling apart.
Prices had gone up a bit in my absence too. These two were £15 pounds each. I bought them both, not caring if I was being fleeced or not, and left the shop quickly. Coming out onto the street again, I could barely wipe the little-boy-grin from my face. I was back. A collector again.

Of course, I had no doubt that I was, in part, displaying the first classic symptoms of a midlife crisis. Fooling myself into thinking that by buying up old stapled together pieces of folded coloured paper, I could recapture lost youth. I was regressing, doping myself on nostalgia, taking refuge in the illusory certainties of the past. After all, don’t they say collectors are often the kind of people who do so precisely in order to cover up hidden anxieties and insecurities? My situation spoke for itself: I had no proper job, I had been writing for longer than I cared to remember without any real success, the novel I had been trying to piece together for the past year or so wasn’t exactly going well. I was in trouble, wasn’t I? Yet despite all this, buying those two comic books made me feel good, blissfully happy in a way I hadn’t felt for a long time.
I started visiting the comic shop on a regular basis after that, in the hope that some silver age comics might turn up. In the meantime, I gradually bought up all the other early bronze age issues they had in stock. Probably they saw me coming. I didn’t care. Each time I left the shop I did so with the same feeling of having escaped with something, of having clawed back some vital part of myself that I had lost back there, somewhere on the thorny path to adulthood. As I say, throughout the seventies and early eighties I had been in love with Marvel comics, these strange and wonderful tales from the Marvel Universe that winged their way once a month all the way from America. However, these imports came in only sporadically and were difficult to track down when they did, particularly in a rural town like Hereford where I was brought up. Often I had to settle for the black-and-white British reprints. Certainly, buying my Spider-Man Comics Weekly from my newsagents every Thursday was a big event in my week. Missing an issue then, in the days before eBay, would leave me devastated. Gaps in my collection would take on a gnawing significance in my mind, like days in my life that I had somehow been cheated of, with little or no chance of their ever being recovered.
I was going to have to get used to a few gaps now. The asking price for a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1 in Fine+ condition (condition and rarity is everything in the world of comic collecting) was £3,200, and the other early issues weren’t much more affordable. It quickly became about more than just the comics anyway. I liked the feeling of that shop, the sense of Mr Benn mystique it gave off. Delivery day, when the month’s new comics came in, brought with it a sense of occasion, just as it had done when I was a kid. The owner was obviously still a big Spider-Man fan. How could I not be impressed by the fact that he had been an extra in the first Sam Raimi film and come this close to meeting Stan Lee? As for the customers, I soon realised that it was me and not them who had been behaving shiftily, terrified of being branded a sad loser, I suppose, however patronising that may sound. I wondered if they had been collecting comics all along, or been drawn back to it like me? Whichever, it was interesting to listen to people theorising about the death of Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s first love, or the existential qualities of the Silver Surfer’s exile on earth, as if they were actual people.
Something else that struck me as odd about the comic shop was how much time people seemed to have there. No one ever seemed to be in a hurry to get back to their normal lives, even on a weekday afternoon. Some, like me, were probably not in full-time work, but that couldn’t entirely explain it. This sense of stopped time was very seductive. It made me realise how uptight and caffeine-fuelled my life had become. Why not stop and linger a while? As it turned out, it wasn’t just frequented by middle-aged men like myself, either. There were kids too, I was relieved to see. And girls! Sometimes not even being dragged around by their boyfriends, but alone, ambling around the comic shelves completely of their own free will. Things had changed.
The shop also inspired a peculiar kind of loyalty. I hesitate to use the word family, but really can’t think of a better word. Everyone seemed to know everyone else’s name. Last Christmas, one eleven-year-old boy brought in a family-sized tin of Quality Street and a box of mince-pies bought with his own pocket money, and left it on the pinball machine for customers to dip into. Not the kind of gesture you come across much in your local HMV or Starbucks.
My return to comics did have other agendas. The collection I was slowly putting back together went hand-in-hand with the novel I was writing, based loosely, as they say, on my own childhood experience. In my weaker moments, I found myself calling it research. Well, I had to justify the expense somehow. When you are faced with the prospect of spending £120 on a single comic (Amazing Spider-Man, issue #18, November 1964, in Very Fine Condition, featuring only the second appearance of the Sandman), it helps if you can dream up an urgent need for the contents of that issue somewhere in your narrative. This partly explains why a lot of Spider-Man references found their way, however obliquely, into my novel. Yet it’s also true that comics acted as a powerful conduit by which I could summon up the spirit of those times in my writing. Maybe the past really is a foreign country, and as an adult it’s impossible to remember how you thought and felt as a child, but open up a comic you opened and devoured as a nine-year-old boy, and however fleeting the impression, you can get pretty close.
Admittedly, having invested so much, when I got a lot of these comics home and actually read them I would be disappointed at first. Sometimes, sometimes often, the stories weren’t as good as I remembered them. Stan Lee’s writing often fell well short of his reputation as a living legend. True, the terrible Sisyphean frustrations he instilled in Peter Parker of guilt and aloneness and money troubles and being picked on, of the burden of bearing a life changing secret, were still universal ones, but not all of it seemed to have dated so well. The art sometimes surprised me too. Even the great Steve Ditko, the man who invented the look of Spider-Man, could produce some dubious stuff. Look at his early drawings of poor Gwen Stacy, for example, and it’s hard to imagine Gwen would ever have achieved the iconic reputation she now enjoys if Ditko had carried on working on the comic. (John Romita was really the artist who made Gwen and Mary Jane desirable, having worked on the American romance magazines before he began his long run on Amazing Spider-Man.) Not that I recall any of these reservations occurring to me as a boy.
On the other hand, it’s easy to forget that these comics, unlike many of those being produced today, were not really written for the scrutiny of adults. Kids were the target audience to coin an awful contemporary phrase, even if Stan did sometimes slip in the odd long word that still has me reaching for the dictionary. Why then the moment I closed up these comics and returned them carefully to their protective cellophane sleeves would I be worshipfully admiring them again, staring at the covers in a kind of hypnotic trance? Why did I go on yearning for those missing issues that promised so much? Perhaps the truth is I am not very objective when it comes to comics. Nostalgia, sentimentality, middle-aged cynicism, the amount of money they cost me, a sense of loyalty to the passions of my childhood, escape – it’s all inextricably bound up in my appreciation.
Marvel comics were never just about the stories anyway. They were about their glossy covers, the adverts selling everything from live monkeys to tablets that helped you put on weight and life-size Frankenstein monsters that glowed in the dark. They were about the way they accumulated so quickly, their sense of exoticism, their intoxicating smell. They were about belonging to something. That was part of Stan Lee’s genius, of course, what helped make Marvel the hugely successful multi-national corporation it is today. The Stan Lee soapbox, the Bullpen Bulletins, the pennames, the constant unabashed plugging of other titles, the footnotes, the feeling that Stan the Man, or whoever was writing, was talking just to you – these were all designed to make the reader think of themselves as being a part of something special and unique. A family. Which, of course, we were.
The letters page, for instance, was the heart of every Marvel title. Here, fans were given a chance to comment on the stories and make suggestions for future issues. Today, those letters, particularly the ones from the sixties and seventies, make poignant reading. Where are all these people now? What became of them? Some we know, such as Gerry Conway and Dave Cockrum, went on to work as writers and artists on the comics themselves. Some doubtless became accountants, doctors, teachers, forest wardens, comic shop aficionados. While others never had a chance to grow up at all.
In the famous issue #50, ‘Spider-Man No More!’ I began by talking about, which I finally tracked down last month, and which Sam Raimi paid homage to in Spider-Man 2, there appeared a letter from an American soldier, Corporal Leonard St. Clair, who was fighting in Vietnam at the time. In it he talks about how he thought he had left comics behind somewhere in his past, but has been surprised to find himself reading them once again. Jokingly, he describes how he and his Company think of themselves as ‘junior super-heroes,’ and thanks Stan and John for having provided them with so much action-packed reading material. Their comics, he says, are like letters from home, and help take their minds off the war for a while. Then in issue #53, three months later, the editors printed the following letter.

‘Dear Stan,
Since all of us in the headquarters section of India Company are Spider-Man fans, we regret to inform you that Corporal St. Clair, whose letter will be printed in SPIDER-MAN #50, was killed in action on 28 February, 1967. He was a squad leader in our 3rd Platoon when his patrol was ambushed southwest of Da Nang. Your comic SPIDER-MAN is the most sought after piece of literature and art work in this company. Keep up the good work; you’re a real morale booster.’
India Company 3/1 3rd Bb-n, 1st Marine division.

I finished my novel six months ago. Much to my wife’s relief, the frenzy of comic collecting I had fallen into while writing it tailed off a little at first, although the hunt is far from over. I remain a regular at American Dream Comics, and no longer feel as though I am haunting the place. I have fully re-embraced my inner nerd. I have long conversations in the shop now about comic books, the kind of conversations I suspect couldn’t take place anywhere else. For instance, there is a big furore going on at the moment concerning the last several years of Peter Parker’s past being completely wiped out by Mephisto, including his entire relationship to his wife Mary Jane, in order that he can save the life of his Aunt May – a ridiculous and intellectually cheap plot twist imposed on the character purely so that the writers can turn him into an angst ridden bachelor again. Recently, perhaps as a mark of my disapproval, I even decided to branch out a little and began collecting the new issues of Daredevil. They’re not as much fun as the old ones, perhaps, and the fact that there’s no letters page is a big disappointment, but I love them all the same.
Finally, before I slip it back into its dustproof comic bag and return it to its rightful place with the others under my bed, let me turn back a few pages in issue #50 to the picture I was dreaming of three years ago. The one of Peter Parker abandoning his secret identity to the dustbin of history. Obviously, it means something different to me today than it did when I first saw it. It feels like a classic film noir image now, despite the improbably garish yellow jacket he’s wearing (this was changed in later reprints to a quieter, more sombre reddish-brown). What also strikes me is how, true to that fatalistic streak in his character, he has just thrown the costume over the side of the dustbin. Romita probably drew it this way in order to maximise the dramatic impact, but it’s as if Parker’s depression and self doubt is so bad he can’t even be bothered to dispose of it properly – again a thought I am quite sure wouldn’t have occurred to me as a ten year old.
Still, I like to think there’s some sense of continuity between us. Certainly, the image has lost none of its resonance. A heartsick, tormented soul shouldering the weight of his guilt. Struggling to cope with that which sets him apart, whilst at the same time grow up normally. The thought bubble of the departing hero reads:

‘I was just a young unthinking teenager when I first became Spider-Man. But the
years have a way of slipping by, of changing the world about us. And every boy,
sooner or later, must put away his toys, and become a man.’

He doesn’t, of course. He changes his mind and goes back for his costume, taking up the fight once more. As hopefully he will continue to do so.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Czanik was born in Hereford, England, in 1965. His poems and stories have appeared widely in magazines in the British Isles, including Chapman, Penpusher, Blue Tattoo, The Slab, Cyphers, Staple, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His first novel is currently undergoing major renovations.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, June 29th, 2008.