When Walks Nostalgia!
I’m still not certain what I really want to do with this blog. For today I’m going to talk about myself. It’s something I try not to do too much on the show because episodes are not about me and are all about the guests. I appreciate the time they take out of their schedules. Time they could be working on a project, spending with their loved ones, or just chilling out and finally finishing “Stranger Things.” You have watched it, yes? Wasn’t it good? Man, I loved being a kid in the 80s.
Channel Your Inner Struzan!
Speaking of the 80s (that’s a segue folks) let’s jump back to 1985. To a Sunday morning in May when my Dad took me to Hy-Vee (Hy-Vee. Shop Hy-Vee. Where there’s a helpful smile, in every aisle. Hy-Vee!) and I was given my first comic book. Or, at least what I consider my first comic book, the one that packed my bags and pushed me down the road that I’m still walking down 31 years later. Damn, these longboxes are heavy. You’d think I’d be in better shape… oooo, pizza.
My first comic book was Transformers Issue 6, from Marvel Comics. I was a huge Transformers kid. Marvel knew how to sell their comics to kids back then. Well, at least their licensed comics, because I couldn’t watch afternoon cartoons without a commercial telling me I needed to buy Transformers and G.I. Joe comics, using animation that was the same style of animation from the real cartoons! Eight year old Adam didn’t care that Marvel and Sunbow and Hasbro were all in cahoots to sell me stuff. I just knew that I needed more Transformers paraphernalia than what I currently had. By May of ’85 I know I had a Thundercracker, an Optimus Prime, and a Brawn. I know there were more but I lost count after those first three. It wasn’t enough, and I knew I enjoyed reading books quite a bit, and the cartoons were in summer reruns, so I needed new stories.
This one has it all!
Wow, did I get new stories! Transformers Issue 6 opens with Shockwave attacking an oil rig! I learned the word “facility!” Then there was Optimus Prime’s decapitated, but still functioning, head!. And, dead Autobots hanging upside down from the rafters of the Arc! And, Prime gave Buster (Buster, who the Hell is Buster, where’s Spike?!) the Creation Matrix! And then, and then, Shockwave and Megatron duked it out for leadership of the Decepticons! This all happened in ONE ISSUE!
None of this was anything like the cartoon. I was confused. I was shocked. I was hooked! I spent the next two hours sitting on the stairs leading to our bedrooms, entranced. That’s right. I was so enthralled I couldn’t make it the extra 15 feet to my bedroom. I had to read it right there, dissecting this brilliant new form of media, learning how it flowed, learning how to read it, learning that… holy crap?! I can get another one next month! Thus, my collector’s mentality was fully established.
For the next seven years I would make the weekly trip to Hy-Vee and rifle through the spinner rack. That spinner rack was my pal. Transformers lead into G.I. Joe which lead into X-Men which lead into X-Men related titles, and Spider-Man, and finally into Image Comics. That spinner rack was good to me.
There Goes All My Disposable Income
There were other places to buy comics in town too! County Market had them on their magazine racks. 7-11 had their own spinner rack (that’s where I bought the Red Tornado mini-series!). There was a large selection of comics at Newsland too. Though Newsland also sold porn and I thought I would get in trouble just being in the same building as dirty magazines. Heck, even a few of the gas stations sold the random issue of X-Men or Silver Surfer. My little town had quite a few places to buy comics but none of them beat Hy-Vee for my love and affection.
I then promptly betrayed them all when the local video rental/ballcard/coin/gun shop started getting in comics during the speculator boom of the early 90s. Hey, there was finally a “comic book store” in my crappy little Southeast Iowa town. Now that I think about it I wish I had stuck with the spinner rack at Hy-Vee. I don’t even know when it was removed. At the time I just knew it didn’t have any Valiant books in it and dammit I needed my Shadowman Issue 8.
My town changed quite a bit from 1992 to 1997. So did the comic book industry, and neither for the better. The new shop, the “better than a spinner rack” shop, would eventually leave the comic selling game altogether when Marvel started offering their books only through Heroes World and the shop didn’t make enough money selling their guns and coins and ballcards and video rentals to meet the minimum order numbers to get me that new Generation X title that was starting. By that point in mid-1997 Hy-Vee no longer carried comics, and neither did my back-up places of County Market or 7-11. Even Newsland was now a few years out of business. Within five years, comic books had dried up in Keokuk, IA.
Spinner Racks Are For Kids!
I wasn’t given any warning that this shop was no longer going to carry comics. The last thing I got from that shop was the Hellboy: The Lost Army novel. It wasn’t until after three weeks with nothing new I finally asked what was happening and was told, “no more comics.” This is even worse than hearing “no more mutants.” Trust me. I remember losing my shit and the guy looking at me like I was an idiot. To him, it was just lost sales. To me, without realizing it, I was losing a bit of my childhood. At that moment though I can maybe understand how a junkie feels when they no longer have easy access to their fix.
Nostalgia really isn’t a thing when you’re 16, or even 20. But, as I’m now less than three weeks away from 40 and I’m eating up Stranger Things on Netflix, I’m fully aware of being in the Wayback Machine on a trip to my youth.
Thanks for the memories, Hy-Vee spinner rack. These days I think about you fondly. You changed my life forever that May Sunday morning, and you didn’t even know it.
Hey, look! ROM!
Love, comics, and pizza!
Adam