My first comic book was a Marvel Tales Spider-Man reprint. It was the second half of the "Secret of the Philosopher's Stone" story, with artwork by Jazzy Johnny Romita. It wasn't an off-the-newsstand item; Dad had picked it up at a flea market and thought I would like it. After all, I was a kid. Kids read comics.

I wasn't old enough to read, not yet, but I remember looking at the art in fascination. It was in the middle of the story, of course, and I had no idea what was going on, other than the guy there was sticking to the ceiling. Very cool.

Other comics followed, culled from other flea markets. And there was a drug store close to my grandfather's shoe store, Eddie Kreiger's, where you could buy comics, cigars (well, for me, bubble gum cigars), and crayons, and enjoy your spoils at the lunch counter and have a real root beer float while you did it. When I die and go to heaven, I'm going back to that drugstore.

By then I was six, and I was learning to read at a precocious rate. Comics helped, no doubt. I wanted to know what was going on, and so I had to read, didn't I? I learned words like "feign," as in "You fool! He was only feigning death!" Ever the good student, I tried to use these new, colorful words in my day-to-day conversations. Mom thought for a while that I had been replaced with a pod person.

I relied on well-meaning older relatives for my comic fixes, until I got a bike and the wherewithal to save some of my only-child guilt money to go looking for them myself. None of my books were the same (I had several Batman comics, but one was a Detective, one was a Batman, and one was a Batman Family), and I didn't really know that these things were supposed to link up.

In the 1970s, there was no Internet. There were no specialty shops (well, there were in New York and California, but not in Abilene, Texas). There were no chat rooms and message boards with overly opinionated fans decrying particular storylines. There was only the newsstand, with magazine racks or spinner racks full of the stuff, and there were the letter pages, where adults would wax intellectual about the storyline three issues ago and you had no idea what they were talking about. If you wanted to know about comics, you had to work at it.

I kept a notebook. I made notes and charts on various super hero histories. I devoured the "Answer Man" columns that ran in the back of DC comics, where people would ask questions like "what was the first appearance of so-and-so?" When I went to the library, I checked out the few books that talked about the Golden Age and the Silver Age. The thought that there were comics back when my father was a kid just boggled my mind. I'll never read them all, I thought.

Everything was being reprinted in the seventies. I was able to read, digest, and memorize the Silver Age Marvel comics explosion because they reprinted their early issues in full color pocket paperbacks. What wasn't being reprinted in a paperback format was being reprinted in a small digest sized comic, or a huge, oversized treasury book. Comic books bigger than my head . . . this was living. I read Batman's and Superman's origins, as well as early adventures of Golden Age DC comics (or National Comics, for those of you keeping score at home). Marvel started doing trade paperbacks, published by Wildside Press, and original novels, too. It was glorious. I loved the book format better than the comics format, because it seemed more legitimate. I was apt to get less shit from anyone, adults included, because it was a "real book."

See, comics fans know they are in a weird minority, and they embrace that. Comics aren't all-pervasive, not like they claim. Yeah, Superman and Batman are internationally recognized symbols of America, sure, but I've had more than one girlfriend laugh at me whenever I mentioned the Green Lantern. "What does he do, hit bad guys with a green lantern?" one of them howled at me. Or, have a person in your office, at random, name the Fantastic Four. Most will fail. There's comics, as the rest of the world understands it, and then there's comics, as only overly-glandular man-children and social retards understand it. And please don't believe it when aging fanboys talk of a time when everyone read comics, okay? I grew up with superhero cartoons on television every Saturday, live-action superhero shows out the wazoo, and more reprint format options for comics than ever, and I lived in fear for my dirty little secret. It was a one in a hundred chance, even back then.

By the time I got to high school, me and my two or three friends who were into comics had decided that we wanted to actually work in comics. Oh, yeah. I was going to be the next Roger Stern, and my pals were going to be the next Bernie Wrightson and whomever else we were into at the time. I was living in Waco, Texas, and there were actually two comic book shops to choose from. It was a good time for comics fans: The Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller and Klaus Jansen, were coming out, along with a slew of quality indie books from smaller companies. We could do this, we thought, in our naiveté, this making of a comic book. After all, how hard can it be? It's just words and pictures, right?

Don't let anyone fool you. Making comics is harder than splitting atoms with an ice pick. Well, let me amend that. Making crappy comics is so easy that a child can do it. Making GOOD comics is tantamount to digging through the old warehouse, trying to find the Lost Ark among all of the identically stenciled boxes.

We drew, and we wrote, and we created, and we thunk stuff up, for my entire high school career. It wasn't until I was out of high school that some of my pals got published (in Ben Dunn's Mangazine, no less). This, we figured, was just the first drop in what would be a raging torrent from our creative brains. When that DIDN'T happen, we decided to take matters into our own hands. Absolute Comics was formed in answer to an uncaring world's indifference to us. We were comic elitists, making the comics we wanted to make, to show the world that we really could do it.

I was never any great artist, not compared to my friends. And they could really draw. John Lucas has always had more talent than he knew what to do with. But I could write. And there were seven of us, with two or three orbiting around the edges, who were just as talented as we were. Together, we made the best comics and mini-comics we could possibly make. And if you ever find any copies of Shottloose, or Punk and his Pals, or Punk's Misc Debris, you can know that a lot of love, blood, and sweat went into every issue.

No one cared. No one bought them. We were minor hits at the local conventions, mostly through force of personality, but look at it from a retailer's point of view: Why buy a black and white comic from a company I've never heard of, when I can just order more of The Uncanny X-Men? And no, the answer doesn't lie in doing a color book, either.

We toiled. We worked until we were sick of each other. We argued. We fought. We stayed up all night to get stuff done. It was insane. I was working at a comic shop by then, and it was a constant source of inspiration and frustration for me. Outside of the local shops, where local creators will always do well, we were unknown. And rather than having people look at the work that we did and say, "Yeah, you have some genuine ability," they would look at the books and go, "That's nice. Come back when you get a real comics job."

There is an elitism in comics, but it's not the one people think. It's not Warren Ellis fans, although they are closer to it than most. No, the elitism is in disguise as fandom. It starts with the fans, who get locked into buying certain titles like X-Men and Batman. They are conditioned to complete a collection (which is sheer folly, because 99% of the fans out there can't afford the hundred dollar back issues, much less the thousands-of-dollar back issues). Retailers (who are, by and large, a superstitious and cowardly lot) know this and so they order heavy on the mainstream titles and nothing else. And the companies know this, and produce more Batman and X-Men titles to ensure high sales.

It's the rare fan—and the even rarer retailer—who want to branch out and try new things. I had the good fortune of working at comic book shops like Austin Books, and knowing comic store owners like Rory Root, of Comic Relief, in Berkeley, California, who weren't afraid to be leaders rather than followers. But unless you live in Austin or Berkeley, you're probably stuck with some variation on The Android's Dungeon. The Simpsons' Comic Shop Guy is funny not because he's the stereotype, but because he's the Everyman. If you don't like that comparison, then go with Banky Edwards from Mallrats. It's the same horrible guy, just better-looking. But no less opinionated and obnoxious. You can tell Mallrats was a movie because there's no way a guy that far up the ass of the comics world could ever get a girl like Shannen Doherty.

That was me. It was every one of my friends. Oh, we grew out of it, mostly. If you were ever a rabid comics dork and you weren't like that, then god help you, because it meant you were the guy who figured out which superheroes would get married and what kinds of powers their children would have. And then you drew them and colored their costumes and kept them in your most special notebook . . . And all of the elitists made fun of you and called you Fanboy. Or Marvel Zombie.

Is that any way to live, I ask you? No matter which side you're on, there's no point having a serious discussion about whether or not Batman could defeat Captain America in hand-to-hand combat, or whether or not Grant Morrison's Invisibles is a blueprint for a society of magic-users. It goes nowhere, and it does nothing. It's breathing hot air into a world with a hole in the ozone layer. But you walk into any comic shop in America, and there's that guy, holding court in front of the Dark Horse comics, yammering on to two or three of his toadies. What woman (or any other reasonably intelligent person) would possibly want to shop there or kiss that guy on the mouth?

I had to take a break from them in 1995. The last Punk comic had come out to colossal indifference, I wasn't talking to most of my friends in the company, the industry had collapsed like the Hindenberg, and I had been working at a comic shop for longer than a while. I got a different job, changed cities, and cleared my head. Of course, I still read comics. They are a hard habit to break. And, years later, I found myself working for a small press company again, this time Lone Star Press. Curiously, with a much better base of talent, better stories, and better art in general, I found the exact same prejudices in place. Why buy a really good story in black and white when you can buy a crappy color comic that fits right in numerical sequence with the rest of your Batmans? I didn't understand it, I don't understand it, and I never will understand it.

Chalk it up to my upbringing. I had to learn to be a comic book fan on my own. I had to trade away the bad comics I read and didn't like. I wanted diversity. I wanted to read about a bunch of different heroes, and I wanted to know more about each character's history. You can do that now with a Google search. There are fan and tribute pages for every influential creator, from Jack Kirby on down. And that's fine, but there's no mystery anymore. Not for me. I've done all I can do: I've read comics, I've written and drawn comics, I've produced and published comics, and I've sold comics. They are my first love as a geek, which means that periodically they come back into my life and I get all starry-eyed until we start fighting. Again. Over the same things. And then the sceaming, and then the break up. It's a dysfunctional relationship.

And it's too bad, because The Ultimates is the best super hero book on the market right now . . . And then there's the Amazing Screw-On Head from Mike Mignola, one of my top five favorite creators . . . Incredible comics that not even a monopolistic distribution system and retailer indifference and cadres of fans towing the corporate line can diminish. As an idea, as a format, comics are insidious. They get in and burrow beneath your skin. Subversive, like pamphlets, quick and disposable, like magazines, and filled to overflowing with ideas, thoughts, and dreams. They will never go away. They will never die. They may change (and God, they really need to), but as long as I can roll one up and stuff it into my back pocket, I'll put up with the constant aggravation and the endless debates over which Green Lantern is the one, true, Green Lantern.