No one remembers what made me pick up my first comic from the rack and ask someone to buy it for me. But my collection might have a clue: the first comics I got had everything I already loved as a seven year old.

Someone had given me a copy of “Batman & Other DC Classics” after the previous summer’s movie and I read it between repeat viewings of the film and VHS. I liked the sampler but the first comic I picked up on my own was Robocop #2 from Marvel in February of 1990.

Two months later I came back and got #4, but in May I changed up and got other things I liked such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Ghostbusters and somewhere I picked up a free Spider-Man about reading (probably the county fair or the library). In June I got another Turtles and Transformers, but July was only a Turtles, I was hooked at this point. August came and I got both Turtles and Transformers. I missed September and then October 1990 when I turned eight then in November got comics again and haven’t stopped.

read more from "21 Years of Buying Comics: My First Year"

October 1990 was the last month I didn’t buy a comic book.

I turned eight years old that month and celebrated by having a picnic in Pioneer Park with my parents and the friends in our small town of Quincy, CA.

This weekend I turned 29 and celebrated with my wife, friends and hundreds of thousands of strangers during a free music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

And today I bought comics for my 252nd consecutive month. In these 21 years my life, the world, and comics have changed in innumerable ways but I keep coming back. This milestone seems like a good opportunity to look back at what comics I bought in my first and twenty-first years, why I bought them, and how and were I get them.

Next week I’ll look at the comics that came home with me between November 1990 and October 1991. The week after I’ll run through as many comic shops as I can remember going to. To wrap up the month I’ll look at what came out this year that I had to own. Then before it’s all over, I’ll see what sense I can make of my relationship with comics.

I’m not sure why I bothered but I decided to look at the Feather River Bulletin’s website today. It’s as poorly designed and inessential as you’d expect a small multi-town news organization t’s site to be. But against my better judgment I read three articles and was shocked by each one. I never really read the paper while we lived there, but I have to wonder if it was always at this quality (after my Mom stopped classing the joint up that is).
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Well, my year of Friday’s Five Favorites is over. It was fun but I’m glad it’s done. It was a lot of work and pressure. Throughout the year I did actually try to get a head of myself and have a few lists waiting in the can. Some didn’t get finished and I might have only had a title or a few options. But rather than have those linger in my GoogleDocs, I thought I’d share what I had in mind but never finished…

read more from "Friday’s Five Favorite Lists that Didn’t Happen"

I liked Tron: Legacy. The dialogue was cheesy and it tried to be too self important at times, but it gave me what I wanted, a fun ride with neat visuals and sound. Of course as I watched it there were lots of things that jumped out at me and made me think, I’ve seen these scenes and images before in Batman and in Iron Man. Am I making it up? Some of these are kind of specific…

read more from "Wait… what did I just see?"

As we all wait for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to be repealed either now or in the future, I’ve been thinking about a meeting my grandfather went to back in May of 1977 and the statement released afterwards.

In 1977 the Episcopal Church allowed the ordination of women and one of the early and most contentious ordinations was that of Ellen Marie Barrett who was a lesbian. Discussions and arguments spread across the country and my grandfather, Rev. Mac R. Stanley attended a meeting of California clergy. I know a little bit about the meeting from his journal entries and what a gay clergyman said to me at his funeral, but the conversation reached a turning point when my grandfather spoke late in the day.

Afterwards they released a statement in full support of Rev. Barrett and other gay clergy. I can only find it excerpts of it online but what is there is I think still noteworthy:

Gay men and women have made enormous contributions to the Church … daring all, risking all — to serve unfalteringly people who if they knew they were homosexual would turn on them in confusion, or horror, or unease …. It is only from the outcast that we can ever be redeemed, only from that which we want to cast out of ourselves that in finally facing honestly we can ever become whole men and women again. Jesus’ whole life is a statement about that …. If homosexual men and women are not good enough to serve at the altars of the Lord who went to a cross for us all, then perhaps they are not fit in any capacity to serve or minister …. The Church, like all institutions, has always accepted homosexuals when it was to its profit, convenience, and benefit. What it has not done is to be honest about that, to be forthright, to give back the love it has received. I have seen a fine and distinguished bishop of this Church, Kilmer Myers, walk unfalteringly to a cross on this issue, as he asks us to look again at a Christ who holds out hope, confrontation, forgiveness, new possibilities, and redemption for all of us equally. If Ellen Barrett…if homosexual men and women want out of their sadness and joy, to reach out lovingly — what about that is so threatening to us? … Can we look at what the Church’s legalisms have done to people? I call the Church to not only look at that. I call the Church to repent …. The real business of the Church … is to reach out and help bring in the Kingdom of God to our world …. In the name of God, I urge you to help this saintly bishop to start the process now.

-Statement to the Clergy Conference (topic: “sexuality”) – Diocese of California – the Rev. William H. Barcus III, May 5, 1977

This of course took place five years before I was born and I didn’t hear about it until at my grandfather’s funeral when a gay clergyman (whose name I don’t recall) came up to my grandmother  with me, my mother and then Bishop of California and thanked her for all my grandfather had done that day for gay rights.

You can find what I quoted and a lot more information at http://www.oasisca.org/OAsisa%20Transfer%202009/0_Historical/chron.html#1977