The 12 Days of Birthday, Day 1: Introduction & Dad

I'm turning 27 on February 16, 2014, and to celebrate that, I felt like doing something a little self-indulgent here on the blog. That's, like, what blogs are for anyway, right? Right.

So here's the plan: every day from now through my birthday, I'm going to write a fairly short piece discussing some part of my past relationship with comicbooks. It'll be a brief examination of the important people and things in my life that led me to be a big enough comicbook fan now to write about my hobby basically every day. Not to mention all the money I spend on it.

These posts are going to be far more anecdotal than critical. In several of them I will talk about specific series or characters or whatever, but it's more about the impressions they left on me personally at the time, and what they mean to me now, than it is about actually evaluating those things on their own.

There will also be a loose chronology to these pieces, beginning with my earliest influences and ending up with a look toward the future. But it's not going to be perfectly in order, because some of these things overlap with others. You'll see what I mean when we get there.

For now, if I am going to talk about the very start of my comicbook fandom, I have to talk about my dad. I've written about him and his influence on me as a comics reader on the blog a fair amount before, though, and there's also this Longbox Project piece I did a few months back that gets into it a little more, so I'm not sure I want to repeat myself at much length here. But suffice to say, my dad's own comicbook collection, all boxed up in the second floor of our garage, is the whole reason I ever gave the slightest shit about comics at all. And he encouraged me to read them always, even when he knew I wouldn't understand them because I didn't know the continuity. Or like, when I wanted to read Mike Grell's Green Arrow as a little kid because it looked so cool, my dad went through and covered up the inappropriate/intense sex and violence images with I think sticky notes? Something like that. Point is, rather than tell me, "No, you can't read that," he made it kid-friendly enough to pass and still let me enjoy the stories, just without all the graphic details.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm unavoidably going to write more about my dad in later posts in this 12 Days of Birthday project. I can think of a couple I have planned already where he'll play a role. So I'm going to stop now, I think, by simply saying Thanks, Dad!

Tomorrow: The X-Men, Batman, and other TV cartoon idols.