I stopped collecting comics when I was around 16 because my father, who I was visiting for the summer, said they were for children. Though, the best parts of visiting “Dad in New York” during the 1990s were our trips to the comic book shops in Manhattan and Westchester that were hugely better stocked than those in New Mexico. Heck, I bought most of my comics at convenience stores.

Anyway, as I got older, Dad in New York got annoyed that I was reading comics and Star Trek novels and stilled seemed to like toys. That trip, along with massive inflation in books prices from 75 cents to a buck fifty a pop, caused me to give up on them. Though I guess I never really did and with Amazon Prime, a bunch of comics from that era in the 90s, right when I stopped reading, are now available for “free” browsing.

It’s funny… a few years earlier, Dad in New York said he liked the comics because they inserted fun words into my vocabulary like “Uncanny,” the moniker of the mutant X-Men. I always aspired to the witty banter of Spider-Man. When taunted, “You cannot avoid the Sabretooth” the Wallcrawler quipped, “Sure I can, I just brush between meals” and then kicked the furry, musclebound oaf right in his surgically enhanced fangs.

Anyway, I’m reading some post mutant massacre Jim Lee/Chris Claremont X-Men and it is fun how imprecise some of the writing is. There’s a pointless discourse, for example, about how the Earth’s atmosphere dissipates around 50 miles from the surface and that no human can fly through that but the X-Men are anything but human! There’s mentioned of a “parameter alarm” sounding. It’s not tight writing. It’s not Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black Panther. It’s just fun, full of error and indulgence. This ain’t “prestige graphic novel” reading. This is Marvel back when Marvel wasn’t Disney and we’re still 10 years out from Sam Raimi making the first good Marvel movies and setting the course for consolidation, ther MCU and Roberty Downey Jr. as your action hero.

Nuff said!