This week I have been thinking about my father a great deal. I realized that my father was a huge part of my comic book addiction, especially The X-Men. I found that I have these memories of the X-Men comic books & my father.

When I was young, little kid, I got a big toy chest with the American flag on it from my parents (the irony ’cause I am a Canuck). It became the central place for all my toys. At around the same time, I used to get comic books from the local hospital where my mother worked. Every week, new comics came into the childrens floor and the old comics, once read by all the kids, were given to my mum to take home for me. I was very lucky and they had all these old issues of Superman, Detective Comics, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman & The X-Men. I remember this because one day I was watching either Captain Kangaroo or The Friendly Giant and I got the idea to line the inside of my toy chest with comic book pages. SO I went and cut out pages from these used comics and glued them into my toy chest. Later I looked back to see I had almost a full run of John Byrne’s X-Men run glued on the inside of this toy chest. Once the free comics ran out, my father realized how much I loved them and went out to the local corner store and bought me a bunch. He kept this up for a while until he showed me where he was getting them and told me if I worked around the house, I could get an allowance & buy then my comics.

Once I realized I could get comics from the local corner store, it then became fun adventures with my friends to find other comics from other corner stores ’cause not everyone got the same comics or had older issues on dank, dusty stand down around with the candies. So week to week, I would go finding these comics where I could & feed my addiction that way. This continued and got more serious when I went on a trip with my father to Los Angeles. Every time we hit a gas station along the way, I went scavenging for more issues of Marc Silvestri’s X-Men run where Storm lost her powers, Rouge just joined the team and they were in San Fran for the first time.

Later when my parents split up, I fell deeper into my comic addiction going all over the North Shore to find corner stores for certain new comics or older issues. When I used to go with my father on weekends, we always used to go out to other corner stores so I could search out comics I didn’t have. This became apart of our routine during the time we spent together as he had moved out so we hung out on the weekends. This continued until I hit high school and at that time did I hear about and visit the first Comic Book store in my life — The Comic Shop out on West 4th Ave in Vancouver, Canada. Now this store (and others) had been around for a while but I never got to see them when I was younger.

In the summer of grade 9, my father made the decision to move to Los Angeles for work. I ended up staying up in Vancouver with my mother & sister but I did visit my father each summer from that point forward for most of my life. Each time I went down to LA to see my dad, we always went to find comic book stores around and my dad NEVER had problems with me buying and reading comics. He was happy that I was reading. Granted at times, I am sure he wished I had more hobbies than just comics — computers being another hobby which became a big part of my life, another big part of my life I shared with my father. It was after my second trip to LA that I came back to Vancouver and found many comic book stores in North Van, where I lived, and they became my new hang out. I kept reading The X-Men up and until soon after Jim Lee restarted the book back in the 90’s until my interest weened around the time I stopped going to school and had to get out into the work force. From the point forward, I would pickup the X-Men when I could but it wasn’t until Grant Morrison’s run on the X Books did I come back for a bit and again during Matt Fraction’s run.

For most of my life, I have been buying comics & my father was always supportive of my comic book hobby. Whatever issues I had with my father, this was one of the best things that we shared. I used to ramble to my dad for hours about all the comics I got and he never told me to shut up or saying that he wasn’t interested. He just listened and at times made little jokes about what I said but most of them time he enjoyed hearing more tell him all the comic book stories I had just read with a little smile on his face. This is one of the best memories I have of my father & I still have the toy chest.

Kudos to Cover Brower website for the covers!