Comic Book Collecting: Pastime or Addiction?

Back in the backward days of the 1920s and 30s, women temperance unions would roll through town after town espousing their unscientific opinions about the dangers of alcohol, insisting Jesus Christ made grape juice, not wine, and asking men and women to stop drinking and get back on the wagon to ride with them to the next town screaming that Jesus saved you from yourself. To "fall off the wagon" was metaphoric indicating that those early boozers had once more given up on temperance and were after the sweet nectar to the detriment of their religion and productivity. My tale has little to tell of alcohol but much to do with temperance, and a comic book habit that sometimes feels like an addiction.

This week I bought some of the first weekly comic books I've purchased in about two months. That's not a long dry span for some, but for someone like me who lives and breathes comic books it was a big change. It was not that I quit entirely - I was reading the Marvel Essentials and learning a huge amount about the history of comic books. I watched, without browsing, as new story-lines began in Marvel and DC weekly comics, including the death of Batman, the preludes to Darkest Night, and the Dark Reign in the Avengers and related books. I wanted to buy each and every one, but I held strong, refusing comics at 3$ a pop, and purchasing the old imprints for considerably cheaper.

Then the news came: I will have an opportunity to write about comics in a print medium! This was too exciting for words, and even though it is not a paying gig I hope desperately that it might someday lead to one. So this time, after two months of practicality, I returned to collecting weekly comic books to the tune of twenty dollars a week.

The rush I experienced when I read the first issue of the new "Batman and Robin" was very drug like indeed. I felt giddy and delighted, youthful and invigorated, all because of reading a twenty one page comic book. It was a feeling I'm familiar with, yet one that I can build a tolerance against over time, but I believe this time I might be caught for good.

Now let me backtrack a little before people start taking me too seriously. Drug, alcohol, sex, shopping, food, and gambling addictions are nothing to make light of. I have seen people ruin their minds with drugs and others spin out of control with their alcohol, all to the extreme point that they needed to climb on the temperance wagon and stay there. I personally hitch a ride now and then but I believe in moderation in all things including moderation (methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin are classic exceptions to even this old saw, you can't moderate these so don't try). Comic book addiction is better called a comic book habit, and while it can be mentally and emotionally habit forming, there is no physical withdrawal from not reading comic books anymore, or at least this is the common theory.

So why do comic book readers show up week after week, fifty two weeks a year, always ready to shell out at least enough cash to pay for a cigarette habit?  It is because the habit formation of comic book addiction is perhaps one of the most powerful I've seen and no habits are entirely free of a physical component.  If you believe young women can have shopping addictions then I cannot see why men are exempt from such a classification because they buy comic books and not clothes.  It seems fair to say that some inappropriate behavior takes place when someone buys comic books instead of college books, or decides to skip a meal a day to buy more metahero masterpieces, but who am I to judge?  Comic book fans do not often mug, rob, or steal from others in the pursuit of their habit, infrequently are they thrown out of the house for reading, and as far as I know there is not one facility nationwide that deals with this male shopping addiction so you will not see any of us on Intervention anytime soon.

But the rush I get from comics seems very real, and the high I get from knowing that I am into comics again for the long haul is exciting.  It is a decision to spend hundreds of dollars over the next few years, but it may allow me opportunities to write at higher and higher journalistic levels. Yet it's more than that: comic books are youth on tap, a time machine to the past and future, an interdimensional matrix that puts you inside realms where metapowers are possible, and can even be a doorway to the Ascension to a New Age of understanding that some of us have been delighted to walk through.

Comic books open my mind, and unlike psychedelic drugs, they will not ruin the same.  Perhaps my prose is too driven by dialogue and I do not do description well because of comic books, but these are prices I'm willing to pay to jump off the wagon and head for the comic shop with a pocket full of just enough to leave with some comic classics in hand.  Now I put the question to you: if comic books are not addictive, then why can't you stop buying them?