Travel In The Land Memories Built

Despite the tons of pictures I still have to go through from the Egypt trip, the weekend found me continuing my spring cleaning.  I had a closet with two stacks of comics to file.  I won’t say how long I had put this task off but it’s not a short time.

I began sorting everything and hauled out all the boxes and rapidly figured out that I was surpassing the volume of boxes I had…  The first answer wasn’t buy boxes.  The first answer was time to thin the herd, which I do pretty much every time I have to go through this practice – which may surprise many.

What surprises me this time was what I started to put on the chopping block, my very oldest, most war torn comics.   My earliest comics are heavy in the lands of Harvey Comics and Archie.  I haven’t opened any of them in… wow… I can’t imagine how long.  And as I had long ago decided they weren’t worthy, most of them weren’t even stored properly, just slapped in boxes.  So, it seemed a natural thought, toss them.  I got as far as un-boxing them.  I was right there, and then I caved… wow…  it seems so silly to say that I couldn’t do it.  In the end, they’re just material things, not my memories, not my childhood in physical form, but now wasn’t the time.

I’ve got about 1/3 of them stored in bags on boards now.  Waiting for more to come along with the boxes.  I spent the past few nights hunched over them with the bags.  My back is going to spasm soon!

Even without reading them, which I’d like to do but I sure don’t know when I’ll have time, they sure sparked a lot of memories.  I was surprised I could look at the covers for many of those early now-painfully-un-cool comics and remember when/where I got them.  They are attached on some cellular levels in my memory to so much of childhood.

They are also just plain eerie to look at.  As I bagged old Archie comics, I watched the fashions change, but the stories never did.  Even in my childhood, Archie seemed strangely out of place, dressing in the present but living in a very 1950’s sort of perfect Beaver Cleaver America.  Truly strange.  I took a peak at the Archie website today, and you can read some comics online, looks pretty much the same.  Archie still seems at first blush to live and behave like he’s in 1950’s middle America but is dressed up to reflect the first decade of the 21st century…

Anyway, if you need me, I’m in a dusty corner remembering my childhood through older eyes…