Shadows Out of Time

My dad always wanted me to be a comic book artist. As a carpenter and plumber and would-be architect, what folks in his home town called a mule skinner, Dad himself once harbored dreams of the arts. He encouraged me from the start, but when my designs led to stage sets and costume design, when that gift led to the boards and eventually directing, he always seemed disappointed. He loved comics. Loved the idea that maybe, someday, his son could succeed where he had wavered. His own father always thought him a failure, tried to talk him into the military, but Dad held on to as much art as he could and fed that love with the designs he realized for other people’s dreams, if never his own.

Here, in this store that couldn’t exist on a night that couldn’t exist, I stood — a car wreck survivor who shouldn’t exist — in the middle of a store that reminded me of all the old shops Dad and I once haunted. Once upon a time, comic shops weren’t just about comics. They were about comics and pot. Before that, they were straight-on head shops, retailers in the realm of Reggae and righteous bush, but at some point, all the paraphernalia peddlers realized stoners liked looking at shit when they were baked out of their gourds. Soon, black light posters and lava lamps, kinetic toys and wave machines, all the wild mandalas of a ’70s culture steeped in mood alteration made their way into the stores. Then, eventually, underground comics.

Kind of like what I saw here, throughout the store, between the X-Men long boxes and oversized Treasury Editions of Superman vs. Shazam, Conan, Ghosts. One whole window of the store was dedicated to glass bongs, the genie bottles I’d spotted earlier, but the deadhead detritus didn’t end there. Next to posters of Killraven and the Identity Crisis saga hung several examples of Roger Dean cover album art. Yes, it said, breathe deep and follow us to a land of floating, fragmented islands, alien bonsai trees, mud-dobber castles where mosquito spacecraft explore the secret seas. A long glass counter along the far wall contained both classic Big Little Books and hand-crafted clay pipes. Another wall championed what looked like entire runs of various ’50s TV-tie-in series, interspersed with Fritz the Cat and Zapped comics. Black light lit the aisles of the store not already illuminated by strobes or disco or plasma balls. A few dark nooks glowed only with lava shadows, posters with slogans for Panama Red or Zig Zag rolling papers.

Back in the day, I didn’t develop my dad’s thoroughgoing zeal for the comics cavalcade, for saddle-stitch storytelling, but I did collect for a while. I still have a few of the rarer ones he bought me over the years mounted in my office. But Dad loved the medium from his first Action to his last Sandman. I may have moved on, but the love of my father, my desire to have some connection to him, particularly after the Alzheimer’s set in, demanded I keep one foot in the art of antiquity and one in the world of word balloons. Consequently, part of me both loves and hates what stage and screen have become. Comic book characters, comic book plots, comic book themes. All the great drama fleeing from Broadway to boob tube, cineplex to idiot box. But since I grew up with Kirby and Ditko, Doctor Strange and Adam Strange, all the new gods, I live in a kind of perpetual schizophrenic state.

Walking the length of the store, checking the center aisle boxes occasionally for titles I might recognize, I was glad of the warmth, I was glad for safe haven, but I wondered how a store so brazenly counter-culture still existed in a state like Oklahoma. After my BA, before I moved to Southern Cal for grad school, I holed up in Kansas for a while. Further north, less inbred, but not so different. There, in Wichita, for almost two years, the police regularly raided a woman’s house who lived just down the block from me. She sold pot paraphernalia, yes, but it was advertised otherwise. Bongs were “decorative bowls.” Roach stones were “beads.” Clay pipes were “native American art.” They busted her anyway.

Okay, it ain’t Kansas, but how the hell does this store stay afloat? How do they keep the Securitate at bay?