The four month comic chasm

I didn't get to comic stores on a regular basis until well into the 1990s, so my entire childhood of reading American comic books was always just behind the times. Four months behind, to be exact. 

Because it took four months for issues to arrive from the other side of the world. So the first time I got to an actual comic shop, it was weirdly disorientating, because it was getting a glimpse months into the future. My first comic shop had the first issue of Excalibur on the shelves, weeks before I even knew what had happened in the Fall of the Mutants. So much had happened in those few months and I was totally lost. 

I longed to send fan letters in to the X-Men, but couldn't be writing to them about the things that happened months ago. It was also hellishly expensive for a kid to send a letter overseas and it didn't feel like it was worth sending something when they are definitely not going to use it because they killed off Rogue a month after I sent something about her being the eternal X-man. (That was the closest I ever came.)

But the situation with the Galaxy's Greatest Comic was even worse, because it was six months before 2000ad got to my neck of the woods. I would spend a significant amount of my childhood wondering what was happening to Dredd in those impossible future comics on the far side of the world. And this was the golden age of the character, where significant shit was going down all the drokking time.   

Those days just added to the isolating feeling that I would feel when reading comics. I had very few friends who cared as much about Kitty Pryde as I did, and certainly no direct connection to any larger community. The temporal chasm just added to that and comics became more of an internal thing, an obsession that I kept largely to myself.

At least until the internet came along, at about the same time I started getting comics the same week as my cousins in the rest of the world. Until then, I had absolutely no idea what was coming, and could only imagine what the rest of the world was reading, which did help avoid spoilers about the fate of Johnny Alpha, I suppose.

But with regular trips to the comic shop and the first online message boards and news sites, I finally had all the information, and was getting comics at the same time and that was a total game changer. I could even interact with other people (and feel that interaction peaked with the discussion of who was going to be in the JLA in Morrison's second year on the title, which as some time ago). 

Now I can still get a new issue of Concrete as the same time as the US (even slightly sooner, due to international date lines). 2000ad is back to six months behind, and too expensive and that's not a big deal because I'm holding fast to my current fallow period (although it's kinda easy when every prog is full of deeply average Kek-W stories). I don't need to keep up.

But I still remember the joy of getting my hands on the first comics from the future, and seeing what my favourite mutants were up to at the same time as everybody else. And the joy of that closing chasm still resonates.