Needle, Meet Haystack

It’s easy enough to thank someone, be it a relative, friend, or complete stranger.  Hallmark singlehandedly saved its business through the invention of the thank-you card.  And we can even thank our ancestors, though often in a more religious or ceremonial fashion.  But there is one type of person who we can never truly thank, despite what they may give us.  I refer, of course, to fictional characters.  The best we can do is pay tribute to them by sharing their stories with others.  So, this is my message of thanks to someone who will never truly know what they gave me.  But first, a little background:

My dad loves to read.  As in, my parents’ house is almost a library.  As in, every room is a fire hazard.  As in, he buys duplicate books all the time because he has no idea where he put his current copies.  So growing up, I went to a lot of bookstores.

Not that I minded much.  According to my parents, I somehow taught myself to read when I was 3, despite their attempts to dissuade me from reading until I reached elementary school.  But by the time I was 5, I was burning through Heinlein and Asimov like nobody’s business.  I had stopped reading Grisham earlier that year as I thought it was, to quote Li’l Andy, “Too easy.”  And by the time I was 6, I was almost burned out on reading.

So when Dad and 6 year-old me went into the (sadly now closed) Waldenbooks in the local mall, I was sure I wasn’t going to enjoy myself.  That is, until I saw a spinner rack full of brightly-costumed characters doing battle with the forces of evil.  I perused the rack, my excitement building, until finally, it reached a crescendo when I saw this cover.

Dude in armor with jet boots is straight up flying into a big ol’ pack of missiles with a clenched fist like he’s going to punch them.  Or, as my six-year-old brain saw it, THE FLYING ROBOT DUDE IS GOING TO PUNCH SOME EXPLODEY THINGS.

So yeah, I convinced my dad to buy it for me.

A new world opened itself up to me, with compelling dialogue, bright colors, visual sound effects, intricate histories, and, yes, plenty of ‘splosions.  I was hooked.

Over the next five years, I amassed a collection of almost 1,000 comics, not counting all of the collected editions that I had read, or the issues I’d speed-read (which I learned to do via comic books) while at the store.  But these comic books had effects beyond making me a nerd: they changed my perspective.

All of a sudden, I was interested in reading again.  I blazed through novels, nonfiction, classic literature, self-help, biographies, and even some sections of the encyclopedia.  I couldn’t get enough.  So I started writing.  I developed a love of language and communication that has grown and flourished within me for my entire life.  And it all began with Tony Stark and his badass armor.

You might be wondering, as I did when I considered this post, why I’m not thanking the writer, artists, editors or other people who made the book, and instead chose a fictional character.  And the reason for that is that it wasn’t really what they did.

Comic books are a sequential art form, one that builds and develops over the years, with characters evolving and changing as creators come and go.  Hundreds or even thousands of hands play a part in the development of a single character over decades of stories.  At a certain point, the tales and histories overtake their original contributors, and the characters go from fictional entities to people in their own right.  Well, except for creator-owned characters, but that’s neither here nor there.

Nope, it’s all about a dude who doesn’t really exist who uses the jet boots on his suit of mechanical armor to fly around and shoots repulsor blasts from his gloves, and sometimes also punches missiles, who I can never truly thank enough for what he gave me.

So thank you, Iron Man.  Thank you.