“I’d found out about the Comic Art Shop from Kirk and Marco, who deigned to tell me that the big distinction separating the callow juvenile who read the cretinous stories DC offered from the seasoned connoisseur who partook of Marvel’s “sophisticated philosophy” was that the latter was also a commodity fetishist who carefully catalogued his collection and who paid not inconsiderable amounts for select back issues, which were then placed individually in special plastic bags and stored away in special cardboard boxes. Being the sort of kid who left his comics in the bathroom, tore off their covers, and clipped order blanks from them, I’d had no idea. But it was pretty serious business: on Saturdays the shop resembled the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, with kids milling three and four deep at the counter, hollering out orders at the clerk, usually the same guy in his early twenties with blond steel wool hair, vivid acne, and an unfailingly patient attitude. You worked from a scribbled list. You had a price in mind. You tried to complete series, or to collect issues featuring particular artists; or you followed private criteria that would have been complicated and vaguely embarrassing to explain. You had an idea, in the Platonic sense, which is all collecting really is (whenever I’m in the presence of someone’s array of matchbooks or shoes or 45s I find myself imagining the pathology, the dream of order or comprehension or coherence it objectifies, for a collection is a snippet of dream-language, openly and inscrutably babbling away). In my case, the idea was simple: I was going to school myself in Marvel folklore, applying myself with the scholarly fervor of a convert, the Graham Greene approach–though, actually, the more appropriate analogy is that of the Ger Sheker, the mendacious stranger who converts to Judaism for ulterior motives or material gain. My scholarly aims derived from entirely unscholarly motivations–I stood in that shop, with its pleasant smell of moldering paper and cardboard, blowing my allowance and my birthday and Christmas loot because I’d started to make some progress, socially, and I wasn’t about to…”
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