Hail Eclipso!

Feeling an awkward and powerful emotional attachment to a comic book is bad enough when it's actually a good comic, full of gorgeous art and poetic writing. When you have that kind of deep connection with the first issue of Eclipso: The Darkness Within, you've probably got a problem.

Like everything else in this weird universe we all somehow exit in, it's all about the context. That issue of the comic book came out the exact month I left school and started looking for a job, and that's a pretty big fuckin' time in anybody's life. I was 17 and a complete DC comics freak and I wanted that first issue of Eclipso so bad, and it was sitting on the bookshelf taunting me at Baird's Bookshop, and I didn't have any fucking money.

It was a $8.95 issue in my part of the world, twice the cost of an X-Men or New Warriors comic, and you didn't get a lot of DC comics in my ton, so I had to grab what I could get, even if I was never really into the bulbous waviness of Bart Sears' art, and even if it didn't come with the free plastic black diamond that others got.

So I said to hell with college or university - the idea of more school was just too much - and went and got a job at a literal fat factory. It was a shitty, smelly and hot job, but the very first thing I ever did with my first proper paycheck was go get a TV aerial so we could get season three of Star Trek The Next Generation, and the second thing I bought was that Eclipso comic.

So I've had that issue for years, and I keep putting it in the pile to be sold off, and then I keep putting it back with the other DC crossovers in the box under the bed. I even managed to pry away the Final Night crossover from 1997 - which has all sorts of other emotional resonance - in the last decent purge, but I can't lose the Eclipso.

I don't have any of the annuals that actually tell the Eclipso story anymore - I once had at least a dozen of them, including all the Superman ones, but sold them all off long ago. But a symbolic comic like the first one I bought as a working stiff is still sticking around.