My next door neighbor in my college dorm was a comic book fan. I started reading his comic books and then going to the comic book store with him.

Wow! I never imagined there could be such a place.

I started collecting comic books and board and bagging¹ them, and carefully filing them away. When my husband and I moved into together, one of the things that formalized our relationship – more than joining bank accounts or divvying up closet space – was combining our comic book collections. Do you file strictly alphabetically? Or do you put all of the X-Men spin-offs together? But what then about AlphaFlight, which features Wolverine but is clearly not an X-man comic?

I was always more of a Marvel fan than DC. Marvel heroes, as everyone knew in those days, had sticky, messy inner lives, that often manifested themselves in their outer lives unlike DC.² My favorite character was a New Mutant, a girl who wrestled every night in her dreams, with a spirit bear – which then became the monster she had to fight during the day. This is typical Marvel: where having superpowers is a curse, something that causes you pain and rejection, and leaves you feeling guilty when you can save every. last. person. And, if something goes wrong, it’s all your fault.

Despite all this, I was not a comic book nerd. I could recognize the biggest names – Lee, Kirby, that’s about it. We all got to know Stan Lee by his cameo roles in the movies.

When I found this book, I didn’t totally geek out. I thought, oh, that’s interesting, I’ll add this to my pile.³ But it took me a while to read it. Then one day, I was sick and wanted something light to read, and picked it up.

And I loved it! It is a very easy read – and a heck of a good ride. Sometimes you read an autobiography about someone which is really about their job and you get to read about all chances they took and the famous people they met, and how they outsmarted everyone and worked hard and became a household name or whatever. And then you read books like this and it occurs to you: these guys were having fun. It was a wild ride, by the seat of the pants sometimes, but they were just doing what they loved and looking for ways to do it more, do it longer, and keep doing it for as long as they could.

I’m a sucker for stories like this.

Whenever I read a love story about someone who loved what they did at their job, I think to myself: I could do that job. I could learn to draw (not), invent fantastic tales, and become a comic book genius (not). I think what I really want is not to become a comic book genius but to be as much in love with my job the way these guys clearly loved their jobs. And that love showed in the success of his comic books and the love we all felt for them.

Everyone deserves a job that they love as much as Stan Lee loved his job.

1. For those of you who do not collect, boarding and bagging means placing each issue in a special comic-book sized plastic bag with an acid-free board, to preserve their value so that, someday, you can cash in on your foresight for buying two copies of Grim Jack #3 or whatever. ↩︎
2. Unlike DC, where the superheroes were superstrong, or raised on an island of Amazons, or were the prince in an underwater kingdom, and that was it. The challenges you faced were – could you overpower the supervillain of the week – or would they turn out to be stronger, faster, better-armed than you, or perhaps they would possess whatever your kryptonite was. When I was in grad school, I took a class on diversity, where we learned about different cultural traits: community vs individuality (guess which one the U.S. is), etc. We got to sympathy for the weak vs. sympathy for the strong. A classmate asked for clarification and I jumped in: I root for the Jets (weak) and you root for the Giants (at the time, strong). You like winners; I like the underdog. Marvel fans root for the weak; DC fans for the strong. ↩︎
3. One of the benefits of working in books: you can spend your entire paycheck on books and persuade yourself that it’s not bingeing because they’re books, they’re educational. ↩︎