Comix Chic

I make no secret of the fact that in the last two years I've fallen hard for comics. I collected as a young teenager in the dawn of the Image days when the market was booming with pomp and circumstance. Though I didn't know it at the time, that was a huge bubble that popped shortly after I started collecting avidly. At one point, there were actually two comic stores across the street from one another in my little suburb town of Lake Oswego and even though I hadn't been in either for a while when it happened, I was sad to see them both close their doors. In one case, the whole building was just knocked down.

The comics I collected in those days were mixed, but it was all super hero stuff. Having re-read almost everything I own in this second coming of comics, a lot of it is crap. Then, I was more obsessed with the habit of collecting. You don't want to know how much money I wasted on sports cards before comics. I didn't even care about those damn things. That was just compulsive. Actually, my grandpa and I would play baseball card rummy: Instead of suits, you'd match cards of people from the same team. A child older than five could have probably read the team name of his opponent's cards from the back.

Anyway, getting back into comics was very much an escapism because I had graduated college, was living at home and wanted to occupy my time. I'd started reading a number of manga in college because I'd caught the anime bug and, most times, wanted to read the source material for series I enjoyed. But my new full-fledged foray into comics came with The Sandman. Without exaggeration, it is the greatest comics achievement ever. From there I hit all the other big name series: Preacher, Concrete, Transmetropolitain, Lucifer, Books of Magic. At the same time, I fostered an appreciation for the alternative scene. My Mom had gotten me a copy of Maus back in my first phase because in her mind it was a way for my love of comics to have some real impact rather than good guy fist meeting bad guy face (she was right, by the way). Daniel Clowes, Paul Pope, Craig Thompson, Jason Lutes, Paul Hornschemeier, Doug TenNapel, Kyle Baker... I've discovered a lot of incredible artists. And you'd better believe I was foaming at the mouth for the McSweeney's comics edition.


But just yesterday I struck gold. I was scanning the comic section at Powell's on Hawthorne when I found the Vol. 2 #1 of Raw Magazine. This is the magazine Art Spiegelman started and where Maus was originally published in serialization. This is from 1989 and it is exactly what the McSweeney's edition is today - just 16 years older and subversive rather than celebratory. I haven't even begun to read it, but let me tell you it's a find. As I was telling the clerk (who frequents my coffee shop) how excited I was, the fellow just down the counter asked me where I found it, hoping there might be other copies. No such luck, fellow. No such luck.