Well, it’s been four years since my last post, and over five years since the last time I actually talked about the X-Men. And it’s been a LONG five years. I want to get back into this blog, but for my own personal well-being, I need to clear the air a bit and explain my absence. While there aren’t too many people following this blog, and most of you know me IRL, the last five years have changed me as a person, a comic fan, and a writer, and will thus probably change the tone of the blog and my impressions of the comics we’ll be covering moving forward. So, I think it’s only fair to explain a bit. So, here goes nothing…

Literally a week after my last X-Men related post in May of 2016, my husband, “C”, told me he wanted a divorce. I was caught completely off guard by this, and my world crashed around me. I would later learn that he’d been having an affair with a coworker and was leaving to be with her. I’d also learn it wasn’t his first affair, and that he’d spent most of our relationship trying to sleep with everyone he could; our friends, his coworkers, even my cousins. Over the next year, I had to learn who I was outside of that relationship, learn to parent my young daughter basically alone, and started the hard work of coming to terms with just how abusive and toxic my marriage had been. What followed was the hardest, and best year of my life. A lot of therapy and a lot of help from my best friends helped me start unpacking the damage C had done to my self-esteem, my sense of self, and my mental and physical health. I reacquainted myself with friends that had drifted away as C’s toxicity started to show through his façade, and let go of people I learned weren’t actually the friends I thought they were. I rediscovered things I’d let go over the years; camping, nights out with my friends, reading new novels, and even slowly found myself falling in love with the best man I’ve ever known: my best friend, Kevin.

I’m happy to say that I got to keep the comic shop and the family I’d made there over the years, as C distanced himself from them. But what I lost was my love for the comics and the atmosphere. It was all too tied up in my feelings about him and what he’d put me through. Comics and the shop were such a central part of our relationship and I just couldn’t uncouple the two. And it broke my heart. I maintained my friendships with the staff and the patrons I’ve become close to over the years, but I closed my file and stopped reading comics completely. Eventually, Kevin and our friend Joe would persuade me to start attending shop events and parties again. Kevin and I even dressed up as our favorite mutant twins for one FCBD celebration and volunteered to work the midnight party like I used to. It felt like coming home. But I still wasn’t ready to start reading again. At least not main-stream, super hero stuff. I did throw myself into The Wicked and The Divine and a few other indie things.

Honestly, the hardest thing was trying to figure out if this love of X-Men and Marvel comics in general was real, and if it was MINE, and not some weird obsession I subconsciously picked up to please C or relate to him. If you’ve never been in a relationship that was controlling and abusive, that might be hard to understand. All I can say is that it is a coping mechanism I picked up without actively meaning to over the years, and it took me a LONG. TIME. to both unlearn it, and figure out what things were true to my likes and passions and what were coping mechanisms. This specific part of my life was the hardest to figure out. I mean, I LOVED comics. I loved them so much I wrote my senior thesis for my English BA on them. I spend HOURS and HOURS making costumes for comic shop events. And I spent an obscene amount of time and effort and money on this X-Men project and blog. But, on the other hand, I didn’t even think of reading comics until C was so obsessed. Outside of X-Men, which I’d loved since the cartoon in the ’90’s, I let him dictate what I should read. So, was this really MINE? I hope you guys can understand how these fears and doubts made it impossible for me to keep going on my project and the blog.

I spent the last 5 years working extremely hard with my therapist and Kevin and my friends and family to find myself again. And I have. I still have a lot of PTSD and triggers to work on, but I’m more myself and more sure of who that is then I have ever been. Kevin and I got engaged in 2019, and I threw myself into planning our wedding. We got married this past Labor Day weekend it was perfect! My daughter started kindergarten in the middle of COVID last year, and I threw myself into helping her through distance learning and uncertainty. I got a new job that I love and that I am kicking ass in, and I threw myself into this new career. And somewhere in the midst of all of that, I silently came to terms with the fact that comics weren’t part of my life anymore. I could finally enjoy Carol and John’s again, and I could watch all the Marvel movies/TV shows and obsess over them with my friends. But reading comics wasn’t mine. And even though that was hard, it was okay. And then, something amazing happened. Something, dare I say, uncanny… I met Chris Claremont!!

John, the owner of Carol & John’s Comic Shop (and a dear, dear friend) called to tell me that he was bringing in Chris Claremont to do a panel and signing at the shop for Free Comic Book Day this year (this past August). John obviously knows how much I loved the X-Men and knew all about this project and blog (I mean, he and his staff were INTEGRAL in helping me compile my crazy reading list), and so he was calling to see if I would like to help him out and work as Chris’s handler with my friend Joe for the weekend. Guys, I’m not overstating when I say that that single conversation broke through YEARS of trauma and baggage in an instant. In that moment I KNEW. I HAD to take this opportunity. I HAD to meet Chris. And so I did!! And it changed my life.

Chris is AMAZING. He is wickedly smart and quick-witted, and he just gets it. He loves his fans, and the comics community in general, and he loves to just talk comics with everyone. He doesn’t pull his punches when discussing the good and bad aspects of the industry and X-Men specifically. And he still genuinely is touched by the stories of how X-Men and his writing touched people’s lives, how they got kids reading when they didn’t want to read anything else, how they gave kids who felt like “others” a place to feel accepted and safe. And getting to navigate that with him for that weekend made me realize how much I ALSO felt that way about his writing, and how much he’d influenced my love of not just comics, but reading and writing in general. As I drove him to and from his hotel, ate with him, chatted with him one-on-one, and watched and joined in his interactions with the hundreds and hundreds of fans that showed up to meet him that weekend, I found myself near tears on many occasions. He did a private, VIP event Friday night with just 50 people, a sort of Q&A talk. I dropped him at his hotel afterwards, and just burst into tears after he got out of the car. I finally understood just how much I’d missed the X-Men, comics, and this world over the last five years. The next day, we spent 14 hours together and we joked and talked easily. I told him about my senior thesis that I wrote on God Loves, Man Kills. He was genuinely interested. He asked about how I got into X-Men and my favorite arcs. I told him about this project and the blog. He asked why I stopped and listened as I tried to gloss over the divorce and such quickly, then very gently pushed me to be honest with him about it. And when I was, he just let me tell my truth, and then told me to keep going. To find that spark again and keep reading/blogging. He said he understood why I’d stopped, but that if I was ready, it was time to start again to redefine this part of my voice.

And so, my loves, here I am! Bearing my heart for all to see, and eagerly preparing to jump back into this endeavor. I took a few weeks to digest this advice (and to enjoy my wedding and honeymoon!!), and now I’m ready. I hope you will stick around with me, and maybe invite some friends to join us. We’re going to be talking a LOT more about my impressions of the comics, the recurring themes, the politics and such. I’ll still recap the issues so those of you not reading along at home, and just reading my posts can know what’s happening. We left off with Charlie dead, and 1968 ending. We’re currently only reading X-Men, as our Maximoff twins have left the Avengers to join back up with Magneto, but we’ll be adding some more titles in the near future! So, until tomorrow, keep searching my loves…