I was a teenage shoplifter

Most of them have longed faded into retail oblivion, but there are still some bookstores that I buy stuff from because I am still guilty about stealing comic books from them more than three decades ago.

I never got caught in my short and regrettable career as a teen shoplifter, although I came damn close, and would have got in so much fucking trouble if I had been. I only did it for a year or so, but that was more than enough.

I only ever stole comic books, because they were so expensive, and every spare cent went into snapping up every Marvel and DC comic I could get, but that wasn't nearly enough. They were also easy to tuck away under a shirt or in a bag, because they were so thin and flat.

Some of those comics still linger in the collection, and shame me every time I see them. I really thought it was worth it to get hold of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition (1989 update), but I could have just waited and bought them like a normal person later on.

As deplorable as all this was, I still had some limits. I never stole money or anything like that, just chipped away at the livelihoods of booksellers who were only providing me with the best things in life. I also weirdly never stole an issue of 2000ad, probably because it was cheap enough, and I could always scrounge the 77c I needed, but also because didn't want Tharg to hit me with the Rigellian Hotshot.

I also never stole from the local bookshop that supplied the majority of my teen comic thrills, because I didn't want to mess up a good thing. 

But most of the stores I stole from were small owner-operator joints, which increased the guilt that followed down the years. It was just so much easier to disappear a comic when the only person working in the store was dealing with another customer or something.

I eventually stopped when a classmate at school offered to pay me five bucks to get a motorcar magazine. I wasn't risking everything for five bucks, I was risking everything for a 10-year-old issue of Fantastic Four, but I also didn't want a reputation as that kind of person. What would Batman say?

Besides, I was starting to get money from actual jobs like mowing lawns and babysitting, and that was so much less stressful that the five-fingered discount. And so much of the money I've earned in the decades since have gone back into those shops, while they still lasted. 

I never paid off the guilt though, and I never will. It just wasn't worth it.