I was never a comic book kid. I grew up with Star Wars and cartoons, and the ones that really stuck were Battle of the Planets, Transformers, and the 1967 Spiderman (thanks to the theme song). (Robotech would come later, but it was on another plane of existence.) I knew about superheroes because of the Christopher Reeve movie and the Adam West Batman and, of course, lunch boxes. Comics existed, but they weren't my bread and butter. They seemed kind of childish and incomprehensible, an attitude that got reinforced when I got a stack of mid-80s Marvel books to help tide over our first family trip to New Zealand. There were some Transformers books, GI Joe, and an X-Men that was too weird for twelve-year-old me to handle (New York is encased in a magical force field, and everyone reverts to a pseudo-feudalistic version of themselves). Even the arrival of the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles trade paperbacks didn't help.
That all changed my sophomore year of college when my roommate took a class whose required reading included Alan Moore (Watchmen), Neil Gaiman (Sandman: Season of Mists), and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns). After I had consumed them and tried to patch my blown mind back together, one of the guys down the hall let me attack his collection, which included Miller's epic Daredevil story Born Again. If Watchmen is the deconstruction of superheroics, Born Again is the distillation of them: Matt Murdock's life is torn apart by his archenemy, and he spends most of the book out of his tights and trying to keep from going insane. David Mazzucchelli's art is clean and realistic, and Miller's writing is economic and sharp. It is a fabulous book, and it was the reason that I dove into everything Miller wrote or drew, including Give Me Liberty and Sin City.
Which brings me to today, and the eighteen pounds of Frank Miller books that I'm putting up on eBay.
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