It's 2021 and if we weren't in another bloody lockdown, I could still go to the local comic shop and buy a new X-Factor comic by the immortal team of Louise and Walt Simonson. What a wonderful world this can be sometimes.
It might be pants, and I don't care, because Simonson X-Factor is my favourite kind of X-Factor. And I know - I know - that I can't ever catch the same feeling I had when I got X-Factor #27 off the shelves at the Park Store, next to the Timaru Botanical Gardens, while walking from town to my Nana's house (not Nana Smith, Nana V. Both outstandingly lovely people).
That lazy Saturday afternoon was 33 years ago, but I'm still high from getting this comic and reading the absolute shit out of it that day, over and over again. I was 13 and had only ever been a fairweather X-Men fan, but this Fall of the Mutants epilogue was everything I never knew I needed, and all I wanted was x-comics from that moment on.
Only true fucking dorks say stuff like this, but it's true - it's really like the first hit of a drug. You're never gonna get that exact feeling ever again, but you're bloody well going to keep trying to get it. What else are you gonna do with your life? Something constructive? Fuck that.
Even though it's impossible, because I'm not a kid anymore. Those innocent days of finding odd issues of the weirdest fucking comic books, and not having any money for the ones you can, they're long gone. I've been able to buy any damn comic I find on the shelves for decades now, and it's never the same.
Sometimes you get something really fucking good, and it's close to that thrill, but it's still not there.
But the chase is the thing, the chase is everything. Get your kicks where you can, and keep going back to them, for as long as you are still able. Chasing the thrill of some random X-Factor comic from 33 years ago helps keep me going. It all helps.
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