Always one to pursue useless knowledge wherever he can find it in a seemingly never-ending quest to achieve the improbable and downright unlikely status of modern-day Renaissance man, Mark Bittmann has indulged his desire to never be lost in any conversation, by developing an arcane understanding of things of little consequence or import while maintaining his alleged status as a small fish in a small pond.
As long as his self-indulgent whim is catered to, he manages to sustain the facade of someone under the misperception that others care about what he thinks. With a ubiquity normally reserved for greenhouse gasses, he chases his random and inconsequential thoughts with all the tenacity of a banana peel. This is his life, his curse, and his twisted and maniacal way of impressing the ladies.
Life is a series of twists and turns on paths chosen. Sometimes it is unclear if we are here to learn any lessons in particular in our endeavor to make it through the gauntlet of daily existence, or if we merely function as unknowing, animate, slapstick punch lines in a cosmic joke played out for the amusement of the deity of our choice. Far greater minds than my own have pondered this question in various tomes and essays. I bowed to their greater analytical skill long ago and decided, like many others, to seek the answers that best addressed my questions of, as Douglas Adams put it: life, the universe and everything. I know there will always be death and taxes. I’m relatively sure Einstein was correct in a great number of his theories, as so many advances in physics and the application thereof since his positing of them have, time and again, further proven his work. I also know that comic books will always be there for me when I need them.
They started out as a way to kill time in my parents’ station wagon on cross-country summer vacations, issued to me by my parents themselves, not so much as to introduce me to the wonders of four-color (it was the ‘70s after all) storytelling so much as it was to keep me the hell quiet whilst cooped up in the back of back seat with my icky sister for hundreds of miles at a stretch. The next thing I know, my parents are wondering if everything is all right because it is so quiet. It’s not that they were complaining, mind you. They were just wondering what happened to the din of squabbling siblings fighting over candy, views of sights out the window and issues of territory surrounding the limitations of bench seats. Comic books got me through the horror that was sharing space with a girl (although I didn’t mind so much when my sister’s girl friends sat between us) as a young lad and helped me find myself by sharpening my taste in just what kind of superhero stories (and by extension, stories in general) I liked and why I liked them. The next thing I knew, I was in high school in search of an identity, and lo and behold it turns out there were other adolescents in school that found something riveting in the Phoenix saga and the ongoing question of what would happen next in Spider-Man, something to be pondered over in geek speak for hours.
All that lasted until I was about 15 or so and began to become increasingly interested in the female form…and not in an artistic sense. I loved my comic books, but frankly, I had outgrown them. It turns out this happened just a couple of months before Frank Miller began his run on Daredevil and after Claremont and Byrne had split as co-creators of the Uncanny X-Men. I’d just barely missed the boat at witnessing the original publications of both Miller’s run on the Man Without Fear and his return of the Dark Knight to funny book relevance and the consciousness of popular culture. Talk about a missed opportunity.
Several years later I found myself at a loss as to just what it is that women really want and began to rearrange my priorities, downgrading their place in my daily life from necessity to luxury and deciding to live my life for myself instead of the pursuit of my other half. In short, I wised up and realized that one can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit and decided to stop dating the wrong women for the wrong reasons. I guess I grew up again. From what I’ve gathered, I’m not the first to come to such a conclusion at that stage in life. Needless to say, I’ve been much happier and made better choices ever since. I didn’t say I’ve made great choices, just better choices. Or as one much wiser than myself once said (it is, evidently, a long list): “Small steps, Grasshopper.”
Anywho, this discouragement disguised as a redirection in life must have left me with some sort of need to recapture the joys of my youth and I knew I needed a new hobby to help consume my new abundance of free time. I then started thinking about an article I’d read about The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Maus and other revolutionary graphic novels in Rolling Stone. The next thing I know it’s as though CNN has someone working for them that fancies comic books, as I keep running into news stories about comics on Headline News. Then the formation of Image comics made headlines in general, a friend at work said he was going to the comic book store and asked if I wanted a copy of Youngblood #1 as well…and I bit. For some reason it didn’t matter that it was just about the worst comic book I’d ever read and the art was childish, inconsistent and silly, the media had more to say about the current state of comic books than Youngblood and what they were saying sounded pretty cool, so back to a comic store I was headed. Comics had saved me from girls again. The irony is that now my sister is no longer icky and she and I get along just fine and it’s all the other girls that give me fits…at least when I’m not giving them fits. I’ve always been the first to admit that the path of love is a two-way street and that I’m no picnic either.
Now, a dozen years after growing up again and returning to my youthful passion that itself has grown up over the years, I look back and see that comics were there during some of the roughest times of my life (not just my love life) as well as some of the best. I see that those hours spent fighting over nothing that really mattered in the long run with my sister are times that I would not trade for anything in the world and that our growing up together meant more than tolerating one’s propensity for calling the other a “booger-head.” It meant understanding the people we would become. The girl that comics first saved me from, my sister, is now my greatest ally in life and she even offers the occasional advice for dealing all the other girls out there. However, even she has a limit to her powers of kinship one can draw strength from and for the times when comforting words are not enough and I need to check out of reality for a while. That’s when its time for comic books to once again come to the rescue.
