So I've been digging through the old boxes of comics, the way the title says.  Poring through pages of stuff I haven't looked at in about 20 - 25 years, I think.  And as I'm looking, I find myself wondering, "Who is this guy?"  As in: who was the kid who bought all this stuff?  I can remember almost none of it.  Sure, there are a couple of things I can recall, the Dark Horse "Aliens," and "Virus" series(es), DC's Captain Carrot, MAD and Cracked (My Scrooge McDuck and Adventures of Mickey Mouse stories don't count because they never wound up in those dusty old boxes, because Carl Barks WAS JUST THAT AWESOME)... But, dude, there's like, hundreds and hundreds of comics in there, and they might as well be all new again, because I can't remember any of it.  So... was I influenced?  I don't know.  I can't see any trace of me as a writer or artist in any of this stuff.  Yet clearly I devoted a lot of time to these books.

It appears that I probably bought everything that ever had the words "Lovecraft" or "Cthulhu" (from Millennium and Adventure -- are those publishers still around?) on them.  Honestly, does anyone out there think H.P. Lovecraft could get a story published today?  Because I don't -- I love the guy, but his over-abundance of words and lack of characters just could not crack the market today (I read one of his short stories to my daughter on Hallowe'en last year, and there isn't enough air in a human lung to get through even one of his sentences without a pause to inhale, so even his audio books would be difficult). I was gravitating towards artists and stories that had more figurative/expressive elements in them as opposed to just illustrations of what was happening.  Which seems really weird to me now.  Because I hate when people do that.  And it looks like I liked Todd MacFarlane a lot.  I followed his Spiderman work and collected Spawn for quite a while -- and it must be the art, because the writing is kind of... weak.  And the whole character Violator is just too over the top evil / dark for me now.  It wasn't bad enough to just imagine a greasy ice-cream man sexually molesting children -- he had to be a demon too?  I DO remember scoping out John Buscema's work at garage sales and flea markets and the like because HIS was the name on the cover of "How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way!" and that was the Bible of drawing style as far as I was concerned as a twelve year old.  So I have stacks of his work on Thor, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer -- and it's difficult for me to get through an issue now.  In fact, I have a hard time believing I ever actually read this stuff -- maybe I was just looking at the pictures, but that doesn't seem likely either.  The amazing thing is how these "writers" (that's a quote from the credits page) could put together such a ridiculously, pretentiously psuedo-complex story of "psychology" and "technology" and never once have a frame of just dialog happening.  It all happens in the midst of lasers and jet-packs and spaceships and blaster explosions and fisticuffs.  All of it.  In one frame I'm looking at, a guy (Klan? I wanna say?) is wielding a sonic cannon and creating a sound-demon with it, and describing the "basis" for the use of this power, while stuff is exploding behind him and he's trash-talking Mr. Fantastic and the Human Torch, and Invisible Girl is having an anxiety attack caused by a flashback memory in the background.  One frame.  It has about 500 words of dialog in it.  It would probably have to happen in the space of about 1/10th of a second, but that one panel has more writing than what a person on DA could legitimately be expected to read in a whole day on-line -- and it's all terrible.  Buscema's drawing is awesome, but...  it's kind of hard to appreciate it when it's surrounded by so much crap, and a lack of awareness about how crappy it is; it would be different if it were presented in a B-movie kind of way, which it never is.  And why isn't it?  Why can't any of the guys writing that stuff realize how ridiculous it is?  Then, at the back of these issues, the editor is fielding letters which appear to all have been written by guys with PhDs.  Really?  You're some kind of professor and you have nothing better to do with your time than perform literary criticisms on The Avengers? Dude, no one is going to confuse Captain America's rebuttal of the claim of Red Skull on page 18 panel 4 with the writing of Immanuel Kant, so why have you?  The letters are actually the funniest part now, come to think of it.  And I found manga in these boxes!  I read manga 20 some-odd years ago and I can't even remember it.  You know what's REALLY amazing about it?  20 years ago, it was still Naruto, Bleach, Inuyasha stuff -- except with different character names.  Everyone was a demon-martial-artist with a spirit-infused katana, throwing glowing chi from his fingertips, battling a revived evil of some kind.  I guess that never gets old, right?  There WAS Ranma 1/2.  That was fun.  Something a little different; but I still couldn't remember any of it.

Anyhow. I've been spending some late, sleepless nights... not reminiscing exactly.  But re-living some past.  And wondering, "Who is this guy?"