We have a few guys on staff who have talked about comic books. I love reading the posts they produce, yet never really got into comics myself. So I figured it was time to bore you all to tears with what comics I have read and why I am not a comic book junkie.

First off I have and do read comics. I am just not hardcore about in any way shape or form. When I hear news of a retcon of a beloved character it doesn’t bother me. The DC universe reboot seemed a little odd to me, but I couldn’t see any reason to be angry. Those two examples should tell you everything you need to know about my love of comics. I love them on my terms and tend to wander in and out of the genre. I think part of what kept me from being a hardcore comic nerd was my very personality.

You see when I was a little kid I enjoyed Spiderman and the G.I. Joe comics. For a period of two years I kept up with both comics, always buying them from my local grocery store. Then my local store stopped carrying comics and I had to ride my bike to another store. This is when I started to get lazy and forgetful. I would skip a month here or there until finally I just quit buying them all together. A lot of it had to do with my scatter brained nature. I would just simply forget that it was time for the comics to come out. Sadly at that age I couldn’t blame my forgetfulness on past head traumas as I do today. I was probably age eleven to thirteen when all this happened. I truly believe that the contents of the two comics I was reading were not to blame for my giving up on them. It was just me being a lazy forgetful loon.

On the topic of the two comics I enjoyed G.I. Joe more than I did Spiderman I remember that very clearly. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the cartoon show was big at the time. Couple that with the fact that I had almost every G.I. Joe action figure I could con my parents into buying me and it becomes clear why the comic was my favorite. Spiderman was awesome even before the movies, but G.I. Joe was just much better. In fact I am such a nut I use to take my figures out into the field next to my parents house and re-enact the comics and cartoon. Later on these re-enactments included real fire and explosions. It makes me wonder how I have all my fingers and explains why I don’t still have a lot of G.I. Joe actions figures. All of this nerdity and I still wandered away from the world of comic books after this period.

I did try to get back into them once the Internet Age had dawned. As an aside I wonder if that term will be used in history books in the future. You know the Bronze Age, Industrial Age, and finally the down fall of man the Internet Age. Maybe I should trademark the term. Anyway back to the topic, Once I had a decent grasp of the Internet and we are talking like 1998 or so, I tried to get back in the loop on G.I. Joe the comic book. I found trying to track down and figure out whether getting back into the series an almost impossible nightmare. The routine would go like this, find a comic book forum and ask for some guidance in a thread. Get nothing but snobbish and asshole replies to my honest inquiry from hardcore comic book nerds. After several rounds of this I got pissed off and went back to playing video games and reading web comics. Today in 2011 this is where it sits with me and comic books. I have some desire to get back in to reading them, but one thing keeps me from pursuing it.

To put it simply time keeps me at bay from the world of comic books. Two specific aspects of time in fact. First I really never seem to have to extra time to get into a series and keep up with it. I was given the wonderful gift of the first 80 books or so of the Walking Dead comics in digital form. I read through about half of them and then wandered off to play minecraft or something like it. The second aspect of time is literally trying to figure out if I can just jump back into something like G.I. Joe or has to much time and story line passed for me to do so. I am not convinced that I can just drop myself in to present day Joe and be completely satisfied with it. I worry that I will not understand a lot of whats going on with out digging back through and reading years of comics I have missed. The bottom line I suppose, is I do have a love for comic books, but its not big enough to overcome my love of video games, online comics and other internet tin foil. I am sure porn probably figures in there somewhere as well.