Explaining the Obsession With Marvel Comics

I’m not just obsessed with comic books; I’m actually kind of addicted to them.

I’ve never smoked a cigarette, I’ve never done any kind of drug that wasn’t prescribed by my doctor, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been drunk. I don’t drink coffee, and I have only a mild problem with sweets. But when it comes to the latest adventures of Spider-Man and the X-Men, I’ve just can’t help myself.

I’ve been collecting comic books since I was twelve or thirteen years old. During the height of my addiction, in the midst of the speculator’s boom of the early 1990s, I was literally spending my entire weekly paycheck on comics. When I worked at the local comic book store for spell, they actually paid me in comics. There were a few years there where I was guaranteed to find a stack of books in a package under the Christmas tree. And though I’m down to four or five books a month now, I still have seven or eight long boxes sitting in my closet.

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The seeds of the obsession were planted early on. Years before I started collecting, I was aware of the characters. Spider-Man was on The Electric Company, and had his own Saturday morning cartoon (Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, which also featured the red-headed heroine Firestar, whose flaming tresses would spark another long-term obsession of mine). The Incredible Hulk was in syndication, and was one of the most awesome television programs on the dial. And down at the Children’s House of the Chelmsford Public Library, there was a collection of colorful hardbound books which gave basic overviews of each of Marvel’s heavy hitters.

I was a melancholy kid with only a few fairweather friends, and so, like so many melancholy kids before me (and so many since), I sought escape anywhere I could find it. Before comic books, I had been all about the Transformers (in fact, some of the earliest books I bought were issues of the Transformers series that Marvel put out), and before the Transformers, I had been all about Star Wars. But there were only three Star Wars flicks, and only a few dozen episodes of the Transformers cartoon. The Marvel Universe, once I found it, was far more immersive. It had been around for nearly thirty years at that point. It was the kind of place you could really get lost in, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do: get lost.

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I still read comic books at thirty years old because they still provide me with an escape, and because life is stressful enough that escape is something I positively crave. I may get frustrated with Marvel’s inability to let their characters grow (they just un-married Spider-Man by having him make a deal with the devil to save his aunt’s life) but, in the end, I’ll take what they give me because they manufacture my drug of choice.