Living Between Wednesdays

Yesterday I was checking in on the comics news site I read regularly and came across a guest column about superhero friendships. Not only is the column well-written and laugh-out-loud funny in spots, but it captures perfectly the reason I love superhero comics: I couldn't care less about how Superman uses his powers to defeat Lex Luthor; I read to see Clark Kent go out for drinks with Bruce Wayne after the fight and talk about Wonder Woman. As the author says:

I like television more than movies because I like to get invested in characters. I like comics infinitely more than television for the same reason. With television you might get a few years of character development. With comics you get decades. Batman and Superman have been friends for decades. They have been through it all together, and that, my friends, is the basis of a good drama.

I checked out the link to the author's blog, where I discovered not only hours and hours of her entertaining musings on all things comics-related, but links to a whole blogosphere of comic book geeks. So now I have a new way to waste time (whose effectiveness in that regard I tested for two hours last night) and on top of that a newfound sense of nostalgia.

See, the title of this post and the blog linked above, "Living Between Wednesdays," refers to the fact that new comics arrive in comic book shops on Wednesdays. For a good ten years of my life I really did live between Wednesdays, looking forward each week to the trip to the comic shop to pick up the latest installments in the lives of these brightly-clad people I'd come to know and love. A couple years ago, "Wednesdays" became the day every other month or so when the weekly comics I now ordered through an online store reached a collective cost high enough to earn free shipping, but still it was fun to get that box in the mail and read through the thirty or forty new comics. Then last year budget restraints required me to drop all but a handful of monthly titles, so now it takes several months to reach that free shipping mark and I feel like I'm missing out on the ongoing lives of the characters whose comics I no longer follow.

I miss living between Wednesdays. Oh, to be teenaged comic book geek again...