The Hiatus Or There And Back Again

I started writing these Reference posts to give myself something to point to whenever I mention a commonly-used term or topic in my writings about comics, both here and on social media.

Things I bring up that may need some clarification, such as mystery packs or the ages to which comics I once owned have been lost.

Collectively, with some of the other posts in this category, they provide a kind of summary of my history with comics, a kind of Legend of Jon—Who He is and How He Came to Be!

I had thought that I pretty well covered everything I needed to with the posts I have.

There’s a post about why I started reading comics, posts about how I got the comics I read, and a post about how I and why I lost many of those comics I had collected over the years.

I realized, however, that there is one other thing I mention frequently that I should probably get into for the sake of completeness: the time that buying comics stopped.

What I refer to as the hiatus.

In the simplest terms, that’s the period in my life in which I had given up on buying comics.

Which is easy enough to understand and wouldn’t really seem to require much of an explanation beyond simply saying, “For over a decade I pretty much stopped buying comics,” but I want to get into why that happened, how it wasn’t a total break from comics, and how I got back into the habit of picking up new comics every week.

The Golden Years

One of the benefits of my time as a college student was that I lived in a city with an actual comic shop within walking distance of where I lived. (Well, it was a fairly lengthy walk, but nothing I couldn’t manage.)

Indeed, part of the way through my college years a second comic shop that was also within walking distance opened up, and while it wasn’t my go-to shop, it did help supplement my comic-buying needs.

It’s worth noting as well that during this time comics were still fairly ubiquitous and could be picked up at grocery stores, Walmart, gas stations, etc., so even if I somehow missed something at either shop there was still a chance I could find it elsewhere.

In a case of “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I got married the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, so for the last three years of my time in school I lived in the city year-round, not returning back to my former home 100 miles away during breaks, thereby having permanent access to the comic shops.

Of course, I was also a college student with a part-time job that only paid ten cents above minimum wage, so I had some definite constraints on what I could afford to buy, but even so, it was a comic-buying paradise compared to what had come before.

The End of an Era

Still, as expenses mounted, I did have to winnow myself down to a very small number of regular purchases and occasional one-off purchases, particularly after I graduated and I no longer had my student job and my then-wife had become the sole breadwinner.

That necessitated a move to a cheaper apartment the next city over, which meant that the comic shop was no longer in walking distance, though it was still just a short drive away.

A job change for my wife meant moving even further away, but the comic shop was still a reasonable drive away, so my somewhat-limited comic-buying continuted.

After an insultingly short amount of time in our new location the wife’s job change also led to a husband change, so, having no means of supporting myself, I had no choice but to return to my former home.

I was once again hours away from the nearest comic shop, and one of the main comics I was buying was not one that was sold outside of comic shops.

At some point I did go on a road trip to the old comic shop – arriving just a day after they’d decided I wasn’t going to show up for the comics in my box and had put them all back on the shelves – and I picked up as much of what I’d missed as I could, but I knew that I had reached the end.

Regular trips to the comic shop just weren’t feasible, and beyond that…well, there was a lot of turmoil in my life, and the depressed thought that kept repeating in my head was, “I might as well jut give up everything I love.”

Life had lost its color, its flavor. Nothing felt the same, or made me feel the way it once did. On my best days I was simply numb.

I picked up a couple of comics from Walmart, mostly out of habit, and I would occasionally thumb through others to pass the time, but it was clear that it was over.

Eventually, comics just disappeared from the places I’d used to find them, but I’d already stopped looking for them, so it hardly mattered.

Not a Clean Break

While I had stopped regularly buying comics, my love for them hadn’t gone away completely.

I would frequently reread my copy of Watchmen, and encourage people I knew to read it and comics like Sandman.

I picked up the Superman wedding special from somewhere.

Comics had largely disappeared elsewhere, but the local B. Dalton Bookseller had begun selling a small selection of trade paperbacks and graphic novels, and sometimes I would grab something on a whim, such as Kingdom Come.

When I lived in Minnesota, I happened upon a comic shop once while on a day-drinking trip and picked up a copy of The Sandman: The Dream Hunters that was signed by Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano.

In Tucson, I discovered Promethea at a bookstore and began picking up the hardcover volumes as they came out – I also read some League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that I borrowed from a coworker – but that’s as close as I came to buying comics with any regularity during this period.

They Have the Internet on Computers Now?

While I was a relatively early adopter of that fancy new internet thing and spent most of my time “surfing the web,” it never really occurred to me that were things like webcomics, or sites devoted to comic news, or people posting scans of comics online.

Or if it did occur to me I never really looked into it until I moved to Virginia and made a friend at work who, like me, used to read comics but had been on a hiatus.

Our jobs at the time mostly involved sitting and staring at computer screens waiting for something to happen for twelve hours a day on weekends when few bosses who weren’t also engaged in staring at screens waiting for something to happen were around. Both of used a browser-based Usenet service, and one day it occurred to him that we should see if there were any newsgroups that had scans of comics.

Turns out that, unsurprisingly, there were, and suddenly there was a much bigger world of comics at my fingertips.

Reading comics posted to newsgroups helped while away the hours and provided the opportunity to get caught up on things I’d missed over the years, discover new characters and creators, and ultimately to reignite my passion for comics.

There were some other comics fans where we worked, so there were comics to borrow, and copies of Previews left in the breakroom, so comics were once again a big part of my life.

But, apart from the occasional trade paperback or hardcover, I still wasn’t buying comics.

I was, however, feeling guilty about the piracy aspect, particularly as I moved from reading scanned comics in a group that was dedicated to posting comics from exactly a year prior to reading scanned comics that were brand new.

Beyond that, I also missed the feel of having actual physical comics in hand.

Comics are like boobs. They look great on a computer but I’d rather hold one in my hand.

Stan Lee, allegedly

Comics on the Move

When I’d moved back home with my parents when my marriage ended my comics moved with me. When I moved out of my parents house, they stayed behind, as it was increasingly clear that every move I made was likely to be a temporary one and there was no point in hauling around multiple long boxes of comics that I had no room for anyway.

The move to Virginia from Tucson seemed likely to be a more permanent one, however, and a bit before I made the move, my parents had come to Virginia to visit my brother who was living here at the time. They brought my comics with them, and when I went to visit my brother shortly after moving here I picked them up.

For a few years they mostly just sat in my closet, but as I started getting back into comics via the scans in newsgroups, I eventually pulled them out and started sifting through them. I found myself going online to buy replacements for some of the rattier comics and filling in some gaps and thinking about how I needed to replace the bags and boards and the aging and battered boxes.

And, as noted, I felt guilty about the piracy.

The Beginning of a New Era

The combination of guilt and wanting to actually hold new comics in my hands led me to do some searching to find a comic shop near me.

The shop I found was actually very near where I worked. My friend and I would go there on our lunch breaks on Saturdays and pick up our books, then bring them back to work and read them.

If there was something I bought that he didn’t, he’d borrow it and read it, and I’d do the same with books he bought that I didn’t.

After a short time, the shop closed that location and moved to one that was closer to where I lived.

Years later the shop closed that location, too, and I was forced to make a much longer drive to their other location, limiting myself to making the trek once a month and finding myself considering giving up buying comics once again.

Fortunately, not long after that a new comic shop opened up closer to home – though not as close as the other one had been – and it’s remained there for nine years and counting and keeping me going back Wednesday after Wednesday.

Final Thoughts

The hiatus encompasses one of the darkest periods of my life, and while that’s not because I stopped buying comics I can’t help but think that the two things are at least somewhat related, no matter which way the causality flows.

It was a time in which so much in my life just ground to a halt and in which I made several attempts to start again only to find things halting once again, then wondering if I should bother trying again, and then starting again, and then…

There are a lot of other things I gave up during that time – and since – besides comics.

Many of them are things I hope I’ve left behind me forever, but I’m glad that comics don’t number among them.

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