Time travel trippin’ up

September is Cosmic Zap month here at Doctor Xaos Comics Madness. With galactic dimensions in the balance, with insight battling it out with insanity, who can doubt that the very fabric of time would sooner or later begin to fray? All of which is to  say, time travel sucks so bad, oh my God. Nuances to follow.

Moses and the Mosquito

It’s 1985, the summer after my second year in college. I wasn’t “away” at college, I’d moved out from home the moment I graduated high school. Unlike many U of Chicago students but like many others, I’d made Hyde Park my home and become more of a neighborhood guy than a cloistered student.

Kim Yale

Kim

I’d returned to reading comics in the summer of 1985. By the summer of 1986, I blush to confess, I had become an ardent letter-writer to multiple titles, a letterhack as the term went then, as well as pen-pal with several other people with the same behavioral disorder (remember: no email, no internet, no personal computers, nothin’ but paper letters and the phone, people).

At corporate, they just sell paper

You think they care what it is?

The Koch bros don’t give a shit, no pun intended, whether you buy Quilted Northern or Angel Soft, because they own them both.

Some years ago some venture capitalists found that, inexplicably, you can sell even more cheap paper to people if you invest a bit in writing on it and coloring it first. Comics are a particularly simple form of that kind of paper. The primary cost is buying it and distributing it in slightly altered form, with some writing and coloring, folded this way or that, with staples or whatever.