It's not often when a little girl's first love still loves with her as an adult. Especially in a box next to her bed. It took me years to find him. And then suddenly, as soon as I gave up, he came and found me.
My first love was a comic book character. Big surprise, huh?
When I was a kid my father traveled a lot, and he always picked up random comic books and graphic novels in various airports to read on the plane. Many of which had a sci-
fi/fantasy theme, like
Conan The Barbarian and
Bloodstar (my favorite), but a majority of what he bought were of a rather adult nature, like
Heavy Metal magazine (which in the 70's were a lot raunchier than they are today) and I
think I remember another one called...
Space 1990? I can't find any evidence of it existing online, and I probably have the title wrong anyway, but it had a race of women with two sets of breasts -- all traipsing about topless, of course. But although my father often gave me the issues to read after he was through with them, my mother would pitch a fit. So most Friday nights when my best friend Sheryl's family would come over to visit, after our pizza Sheryl and I would wait for our parents to sit down to their "adult" dinner of steak and wine, laughing and drinking for hours in the dining room, before she and I would slip off to my parents' room, lock the door, and root through my father's clothes cabinet where I knew he hid his comics from my mother, and we'd have a secret evening of "adult" reading sessions of our own.
My comic book love didn't grab me at first glance. That one fateful early autumn Friday night in 1981, I flipped through his book, looking specifically for nudity, and not really finding much, tossed it aside for something else. Then some time later I noticed Sheryl actually reading the book I cast aside, and
laughing, and saying "There's no dirty pictures, but this stuff is
hilarious!" She read that thing from beginning to end before she finally handed it back over to me, and I sat and read it myself. Not even the whole book at first. And I was laughing. I was
roaring. And although I didn't know it at the time, I was hooked.
Soon I started sneaking it out of the cabinet every night. Then every day. Then I started hiding it under my bed, and when I became fearful of my mom finding it, I brought it along to school in my backpack. I showed it to all of my friends, who all thought it was hysterical, even those that weren't fans of fantasy theme comics. My friend Jeanne used to draw the main character on the backs of her notebooks and all over my yearbooks. My brother started quoting from it constantly (and still does to this day). And I started dreaming about that lead character from the comic almost nightly. I became seized with an emotion I had never experienced before. I stopped eating for weeks, nearly to the point of anorexia. I couldn't concentrate on anything else. After years of drawing nothing but animals, I began drawing my first human figures, mimicking the style of my obsession, but never actually drawing him myself. I couldn't even say his name aloud. Every night I would just leave the comic open on top of my desk in my bedroom, listening to The Kinks, and tracing my hand over the image of his face, over and over again.
Distraught that the love of my life was nothing
more than an image on a piece of paper, I did all the things that your typical melodramatic thirteen-year-old would do. Sitting on the floor of my bedroom cutting my fingers and writing "I LOVE U" with blood in my diary while weeping to Benny
Mardones on the radio. My mother probably sensed my distress, and I could tell that nothing would have given her greater pleasure than to see that comic book go up in flames in the living room fireplace. But instead of burning it to cinders, I suppose the next best thing happened: My comic book mysteriously... disappeared.
My mother swears she didn't throw it out. But how else could it have just vanished? Especially since I had taken to hiding it from her in a similar-sized magazine I had about alligators in my book shelf? I was devastated. Like Christopher Reeve in
Somewhere In Time, I'd lie on my bed, willing myself to enter into his comic book world, especially now that I had nothing left of him to even prove that he once existed. I began to think that he could see me. I began to talk and act as if he were always nearby, listening in or watching. I refused to say his name, even becoming afraid of undressing for bath or bed. Some years later, when I told this to my
psychiatrist, she told me "He's a
figment of your imagination, so if you
want him to see you, then he will." Perhaps she told me this to help me regain control of the situation and make me realize that he couldn't see me if I didn't
want him to see me. But instead, it only confirmed that he
could see me. And more importantly, that I
wanted him to see me. He followed me through the hallways in high school, and I would hold the occasional conversations with him in private. Although my plan after graduation was to take a year off and go travel the country to track down that comic book at various comic book stores and conventions, my mother would obviously not hear of it. I went straight on to college, naturally.
There wasn't a week that went by when I wouldn't drop by Zeno's or Trilogy, digging through boxes of back issues, wondering if today would be the day I found him again. I couldn't straight-up ask about it, since I couldn't say his name aloud. Instead I looked for his likeness in other comics. Books. People I meet. The few men in my life that I found attractive carried some aspect of my comic book character in some way, and I would
pursue that man like that twelve-year-old girl again, desperately chasing the pages of the comic book as they fluttered away in a gust of wind.
It was around 1993 or so when I sat down with myself, alone on my mattress in my old apartment in downtown Ghent, and decided that it was time to let him go. I was twenty-four years old, in a happy relationship, and applying those drawing skills I honed all those years ago to creative use. It was likely that I would never find that comic book again, and it was time to be "okay" with that. It was time to say goodbye to things that would never be. I took a deep breath. A moment of meditation. And it was over. And I was free. And I smiled.
And that's when it happened. The very same week I stopped finally looking for him, he came looking for
me.
Every Wednesday at Trilogy, as usual. Flipping through the box of newly arrived back issues, like a reflex. And I felt it in my hands. I saw the familiar cover. The title font forever etched in my brain since I was just barely in my teens. I pulled it from the box and ran my eyes over it, trembling slightly.
My first love was back. The moment I gave up on him, only then does he finally decide to reveal himself to me. As if he were afraid of losing me. As if to shout "Ollie-
ollie ox in free... I'm here, I'M HERE, OKAY??!" Only this time with a $15.00 collector's price tag covering the three dollars etched on the front at part of the original cover art.
To this day my first love lives in a comic box next to my bed, tucked against an acid-free backer board in a clear baggie, flattened between my old issues of
Reflex and
Maximumrocknroll. I rarely pull it out, or touch it, and I haven't flipped through it in several years. I feel at peace with having the comic near me now. I no longer obsess over him, no longer dwell upon him daily -- though I do still have the occasional dream about him, though only in comic book form. And I still can't bring myself to type or say his name in any manner whatsoever.
But this afternoon, I felt compelled to take my first love out of his box, and while still taped up in his baggie, just hold him gently against my chest while I surf the web for awhile. It's funny how he exists all over the
internet, with fan communities and everything. If there had been the
internet when I was a kid, would I have gone through all that nuttiness in my head, feeling isolated and alone, with no hope of ever finding him again?
I feel weirdly at peace right now.
