used to read superhero comics all the time when I was a kid. My oldest comics (which are in tatters by now) date back to about 1976: World’s Finest (at the time, I didn’t realize that “finest” in that context suggested police officers), some giant-size Superman and Batman issues, and then by a couple years later all sorts of other stuff. My brother was into Spider-Man, so I read a bunch of that, but I didn’t really collect it. But all through junior high and high school I bought and devoured Teen Titans and X-Men and Legion of Super-Heroes.It wasn’t ’til late high school, I think, that I began to regularly read comics that didn’t involve superheroes. But these days I pretty much never read superhero comics.

But a couple of things have made me nostalgic this past week. First, there’s “Mr. Muerte and the Eyeball Kid” over at Strange Horizons; I can perfectly picture the comic-book scenes from Sean’s descriptions, down to the poses. He’s really got the tone down, too—the dialogue, the character motivations, the kinds of incidents. And I think it’s particularly cool that all this is in service to a literary story.

And last Wednesday I wandered by the comic shop, as I often do. Lee’s Comics is where I bought my comics when I was a kid, going by after school on my bike (and not locking my bike); I think Lee opened the store when I was in 7th grade. It’s moved twice since then, and now he has two stores, and one of them is a ten-minute walk from my apartment. It’s a great store; Lee has always been supportive of independent comics creators, from Elfquest back in the old days to Finder today. Friendly and knowledgeable staff, too.

So anyway, I stopped by and happened to wander past the racks of Marvel and DC titles, the mainstream superhero stuff that I rarely even glance at these days, even though some of the more interesting independent creators (like Brian Michael Bendis) have started writing some reasonably good superhero stuff. And something caught my eye: a perfect-bound 80-page volume with a distorted Batman on the cover and DK2 in big letters across the bottom.