the comic thief

Two passages in the past several months compelled me to face up to my criminal past. It was the late Frank Frazetta's paperback cover art that initially drove me into the frontier beyond the law, and the late Harvey Pekar who helped me understand I couldn't help myself. I was an obsessive-compulsive collector -- what one might indelicately call a geek, nerd or fanboy today -- and the only way to feed the habit back in those days was by getting a little Clyde Barrow now and then.

Psychologically, it worked like this. I'd buy, say, a comic, and I'd like it. (Actually, I never just 'liked' anything. It either stoked the fires of my obsessive soul or it didn't matter for shit. That was me.) Having experienced a positive hormonal response from the acquiring, reading and careful filing of the comic, I'd want more. Until I could get more, all I could do was think about getting more: I'd brood about the next comic in class, sketch primitive approximations of the comic art on my notebooks, daydream about it at the dinner table, then lie awake thinking about it until I fell asleep. Whereupon I'd dream about it.

Practically, it worked like this. If my need to acquire a certain comic -- like it was ever just one -- exceeded my monetary means to do so, I'd either steal the money -- from, gulp, my mom's purse or dad's change jar --- or, eliminating the middle man, just steal the comic. It wasn't hard: comics were often racked or binned in the back of corner stores in those days, and you could easily pilfer a few without being noticed provided you took the necessary precautions: greeted the store owner on your way in, dawdled at the candy bar display until another customer came in, then stuffed the goods in your shorts while another transaction was in progress. If you were really cool, you'd grab -- and pay for -- a Caramilk on the way out.

Comics were the gateway substance. From there I graduated to paperbacks. Anything with covers painted by the God-on-earth Frazetta, anything related to movies or that contained collected comic strips. I pilfered a copy of Don Siegel: Director from a shopping mall Coles because it had Clint Eastwood on the cover -- didn't really know who Siegel was at the time, but I learned -- and copies of The Rolling Stone Record Reviews, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Renaissance of the Film from my high school library. (That rationalization was easy: these losers didn't deserve these books.) From a university library, where I'd go to browse movie books I couldn't find anywhere, I lifted a bound copy of an entire year's worth of Films and Filming. And so it went. The only thing that kept me from hoisting albums -- my great obsession from the age of thirteen or so on -- was the difficulty in concealing them in a pair of jeans.

It's not like I never acquired anything by legal means, I did, but it's just that there was never enough. Never, ever, ever enough. My mania for collecting manifested itself as an itch that could never really be reached. It was a drive, a compulsion, a mania. An obsession. (This is where Pekar helped: his American Splendor strips on his own jazz album habit were almost painfully on the money.) But one of the things that made it so -- apart, that is, from some kind of neurological cross-wiring -- was the sheer scarcity of cool stuff in those days. If you saw a choice Frazetta cover, if you stumbled across a book about horror movies or a collection of Al Capp comic strips, you knew there was a really good chance you might never see the thing again. You had to act now, and by whatever means necessary.

That's a rationalization of course, but that's what guys like me did: we justified our extra-legal activities by harnessing them to the higher purpose of saving these junk culture artifacts from an uncaring and uncool world. We were like outlaw preservationists of doomed cultural marginalia. Ours was not mania. It was a mission.

I don't steal any more. I wish I could say it's all about maturity and civic responsibility, but the truth is, not quite all. I just don't need to anymore. These days you can get anything you want any time you want. The days where I once travelled to cities like New York and Chicago to troll for rare books, records and videocassettes are long gone. All I need is Amazon.

So here's my question. Despite the fact that pop cultural passion has gone fully legit -- universities are now full of professors who once had boxes of numerically filed Green Lantern comics -- and notwithstanding the fact that it's become something of a badge of  hip-status reverse honour to declare oneself a fan, fanboy, nerd or geek, you've got to wonder what happens to these creatures when they no longer have to feed their habit through sheer hunger. When they're no longer driven to basements by their solitary fixations, when they don't have to worry they'll never get that copy of Tommy James's Crimson and Clover if they don't grab the sucker and run. When they can sleep knowing that DVD of collected Lawrence Tierney movies is arriving in the mail tomorrow. If obsessiveness is the engine that drove pop junkies like me, and if the fixes were so rare you had to resort to thievery as the only reasonable resort, what becomes of the collector?

I mean, scarcity was the thing. Scarcity was what gave the habit urgency, and solitude -- precisely the state needed to perform such acrobatic feats of moral contortion -- was what drove the adventure. The hunt for that month's equivalent of the Holy Grail, the endless pursuit, tracking, sniffing, digging, pavement-pounding and dusty record bin-flipping -- that was an instrumental part of it all. And that's what gave the ultimate acquisition of the cherished object, no matter the means by which you acquired it, an almost orgasmic kind of rapture. The chase was every bit as sweet as the kill. It's what made it sweet. Alone in my room, savouring those Frazetta cover or boning up on Don Siegel, I was a kind of punk outlaw.

Actually, I was just a sorry teenage dink, but you get the idea. What I'm saying is that fans -- who tend to also blur into collectors, obsessives and monomaniacal single-trackers -- can now bond into communities for god's sake. Communities. They can find thousands of like-minded maladjusted in an instant, and they can order up the the material objects of their desire in a hastened heartbeat. They can read books by esteemed academic fellow fans and engage in endless online debate about the most arcane junk culture ephemera. They can feel they belong to something greater. They can join the club. They're no longer alone.

The way I see it, the intemperate pop cultural enthusiast becomes a fundamentally different creature when you take away his or her solitude. For someone of my vintage and inclination, the very idea of a fan community is something like joining a support group for psychopaths. I mean, the whole point was feeling like you were the only one who got it. The only one who really understood. The only deserving soul on the planet, and thus a law unto oneself.

Of course, I did occasionally stumble across like-minded losers, and sometimes it resulted in a kind of on-the-spot criminal alliance: "You distract the guy at the counter. I'll grab that copy of Bran Mak Morn." But it was kind of like when outlaws cross paths in the desert in a western. You might share some grub and trade some stories, but you were always wary of anyone too much like you. After all, they might steal your shit.