The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

To the surprise of literally nobody that knows me, I love comic books. Mainstream superhero fare, comic strips, indie books and zines, original graphic novels, manga; it is all fair game for me at this point. Growing up, the comic book industry and the tropes therein were always something to be admired from afar; I never anticipated working in or around that industry at all, any interaction would be purely as a fan. Life finds a way to change things up, of course, but before we get into all that (as I'm writing this intro, I don't even know if we'll get into all that this week), let's focus on how this fandom of mine all started. In some capacity, superheroes were around as long as I could remember. My father had The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves on Betamax along with Superman: The Movie and Superman II on LaserDisc. It wasn't until years and years later that I discovered Christopher Reeve starred in two additional films as the Man of Steel and

Even as a kid with summer breaks spent at the pool, beach, and mountains (In that order), I always preferred autumn. Summers in Virginia can get so damn humid that you feel like you're walking through a sauna; this was especially evident in the final weeks trudging to school where even though the calendar said it wasn't summer yet, it sure as shit felt like it. By July, the streets literally become blisteringly hot and walking barefoot on asphalt to the pool meant having black tar seared into the soles of your feet. Winter was the polar opposite (pun slightly intended?) with biting winds over those rolling suburban hills starting in November. The Christmases usually weren't white but snowfall would hit full-force by January and February and, in some cases, stay as late as March. Virginia's southern humidity made that snow thick and unrelenting when it did take shape; if you ever wanted to know what a humid winter felt like, this was the place for it. So summer and win

What is the very first thing you remember? How far back can you go? Can you pinpoint that moment when you become self-aware for the very first time? For me, it's July 1988. My parents are showing me off to some friends up in Maryland almost exactly a month before I turn two years old. Being a cinephile, my father decides to take me and my mother to the theaters up there. We end up seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit . For anyone who doesn't recall the film right offhand, the hybrid live action-animated flick starts with the titular rabbit tasked with babysitting a precocious infant in a kitchen filled with an absurd amount of dangerous objects and appliances. Chaos inevitably ensues as it is wont to do climaxing with Roger catching on fire and running around the perimeter of the room screaming at the top of his lungs. And, in that moment, with that white, goofy rabbit literally running in circles bellowing, I come online. Simply put, I was startled; I had never been in an en

There are two things that I associate strongly with memories and, perhaps the stronger of those two is food. On a biological level, this shouldn't be entirely surprising. Approximately 75% of taste comes from smell and smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory due to the olfactory gland's location in the limbic system of the brain where memories and emotional responses are formed. And there has to be something culturally primal about the association too, right? I think it was Michael Pollan that asserted we're the only species that regularly cooks its nutritional intake which makes the act of cooking one of the more basic, defining processes of humanity. For me, personally, whenever I think of the places I've been to, the people I've known, or time periods in my life, there's some sort of food involved in those memories. When I think about elementary school, I think about those rectangular pizzas the cafeterias mass produced every Friday that had t