The foreground image appeared on this site a few weeks ago: a lonely little girl sitting in a play-fountain.  I added the comic book display behind her here, since she looks as though she should be reading some escapist literature.  It reminds me of my own posture on many a day as a child — always with my nose in a book, squinting at a page and my mother dashing into the room yelling “it’s such a beautiful day out, what are you doing in here???” I would sigh and put the book down, or maybe sneak it outside and find a place to read somewhere under a tree.

Sundays in summer were the best though, because my father mowed the lawn, which meant that he had to go buy gas, which meant that I could tag along and buy comic books from the general store where he went to fill up the cans.  Looking back, I can’t think why this was allowed.  Among other intellectual snobberies, my mother believed that any cartoon was created by “Disney”, a word she used as an adjective to imply commercialism and lowest-common-denominator entertainment.

All of which made my own purloined moments with the X-Men and Fantastic Four that much more meaningful to me.

– The Daily Grunge