Let me just come out and admit that I’m an enormous hypocrite. Sure, I might go on and on about how awesome something is, and how superior it is over another option, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty easily swayed by, it’s the presence of Awesome. Should anything suddenly present its Awesomeness unto me, oh man, will I be over there in a second. I am an Awesome addict, and given the vast, vast array of addictive substances that our modern world presents us with, I think I’ve made the healthy choice. Awesome, and beef tatake, which is basically Awesome in meat form.

My hypocrisy in point : the great ‘graphic novel vs. the comic book’ exploration, way back in September. Who remembers September anyhow? That was like, three years ago. I advocated the simplicity and compactness of the graphic novel over the traditional comic book, but it became recently clear to me that I’d neglected some very important aspects of The Mighty Comic Book in my quest to save space and money.

See, I’ve become enamored with The Inhumans, a genetically altered superhuman team of outcasts from Marvel Comics, who either live in the Himalayas or the Moon, depending on when you’re reading. In searching for their original 12-issue Inhumans miniseries, it dawned on me that the series was not yet collected into a trade paperback format, and I’d have to hunt down the original single issues if I wanted to read about their classic 1975 exploits. While Marvel and DC are both actively collecting their older comics into Archive Editions and Masterworks collections, many miniseries are still unreprinted. So, after a search, I found myself with a complete run of The Inhumans and Machine Man, drawn by such amazing legends as George Perez, Gil Kane and Jack Kirby.

The comics are yellowed, the staples are loose and they’ve clearly been read a few times before. This is a death sentence for anyone with pure collecting on the brain, but those folks can buy officially graded comics if it’s monetary value and preservation that you’re after. There’s a whole creepy conglomerate of giga-nerds who take care of this sort of grading and artificially inflate the values of things. Me, I wanted to lay in bed, sick with the flu, and drift off into the adventures of The Inhumans as they first appeared. And drink cocoa and have a pretty girl bring me soup. And maybe a unicorn. After I started flipping through the first few issues, I noticed the one hugely important thing that trade paperbacks are missing, besides the romance of delicately turning a brittle page and smelling the pulp - the advertisements.

Now, comic book advertisements from 1975 are a whole other breed of advertising, very specifically targeted to the comic-reading audience of young males, and so beautifully, heartbreakingly surreal. It’s fairly apparent that they’re not bothering to conform to any standards of honesty or realism. Often, the comic will break for two pages at a time to make way for black and white ad space. In this way, the original panel flow between paired pages isn’t interrupted, and the ad sections can be easily skipped by the reader. The bottom of the comic page preceding an advertisement even warns the reader that the next couple of pages will be full of advertising, so as not to break the pace of the story too severely. In my own enlightened era, I’ve found that these wide-open spreads of empty promises and quixotic notions to be just as entertaining and emotionally charged as the comic itself. They’re very amusing when you’re not the beleaguered kid stuffing two dollars into an envelope with the promise of learning Instant Kung Fu in 6-to-8 weeks in a desperate attempt at preserving one’s own ass on the way home from school.

If you’re unfamiliar with this brand of advertising, take a look at this gem from the Masculiner Company. Nestled in the warm bosom of the fantasy universe of The Inhumans, those attractive women and outcast muscular men of great ability, the reader is presented with an exciting prospect of his own. The implication that slapping some gluey tufts of hair on your face will make a romantic lothario out of you seems all-too-possible in such a fantastic context. If Black Bolt can level cities with a mere utterance of sound, who’s to say that your new, convincing (and spontaneously appearing) sideburns won’t finally net you that cheerleader who doesn’t know you exist? Couple that with ads that sell you secrets about how to grow 6 inches taller in a week and how to gain 25 pounds of muscle by tomorrow, and you have one violently unrealistic portrayal of the human body and, well, life itself, and it’s all spelled out without any implication that ‘results may vary’ or ‘hammerfist kung-fu technique cannot be learned overnight’ or ‘hell, we’re totally screwing with you here’. Anyone who thinks that only the body images of girls are preyed upon in the media clearly has never read a 1970s-era comic book.

This kind of advertisement featured five distinct categories : body improvement, wacky products, money making schemes, Hostess fruit pies, and individuals selling other comics (often interspersed with the comic publishers selling their own branded accessories). As the decade came to a close, ad space was taken over by full-color ads for video games, candy and Saturday morning cartoons, but a page or two of black-and-white untruths lingered on. Stay tuned.

See, I don’t collect comic books. I don’t live close enough to a comic shop to warrant hunting down the current issues of my favorite characters to keep up with the epic storylines that are happening. Comics also take up a lot of space, what with their fancy backing boards and protective mylar casings, and at $2.50 or more per issue, it’s not a cheap hobby. It feels more like having a pet or paying child support to an estranged spouse than a delight.

So, I collect graphic novels. It sounds fancy and hip, but it’s really just eight or so regular comic issues bound together into book form, like a mega-comic. There’s a scientifically tested probability that if you call them ‘graphic novels’ instead of ‘comic books’, your chance of scoring goes up about 15 percent. Also, showering will increase that percentage. Who’da thunk it?

Cram a year’s worth of drawn-out visual anticipation into a single volume for about 15 bucks and you have gold - the graphic novel. Sure, they’re about 8 months out-of-date as far as comic continuity goes, but they look a lot nicer on a bookshelf, and you can snag ‘em on Amazon or your local bookshoppe on the cheap. They probably won’t be worth more later, as some comic issues are, but profitability usually isn’t my main motive behind my interest in comics. My real motive is that I want to be Batman in more ways that I’m comfortable explaining and I’m trying to glean some of his tricks. So far, I’m up to ‘step one : become a billionaire’. I’m sure that the buttkicking comes somewhere after that, but I’ll skip the whole ‘getting a little boy to live with me and play dress-up’ stage.

In keeping up with the never-ending saga of the immortal Batman, I picked up the recent ‘Face the Face’ storyline, which collects issues 651 to 654 of Batman and issues 817 to 820 of Detective. It deals with Batman’s absence from Gotham, how a reformed Two-Face somehow protected the city while Batman was gone, and Two-Face eventually going crazy again upon batman’s return. While I still don’t understand how a non-physical villian character could defend Gotham city as well as Batman could, nor do I agree with the death of one of Batman’s more important and interesting enemies, The Ventriloquist, it represents an important part of the Batman canon. Ergo, I was obligated and compelled. Apparently, it was really interesting to watch play out over half of a year, but I got it all in one fistful.

See, DC Comics recently orchestrated an enormous, soul-shattering series of events that shook every DC hero and villain to the core. People dying, heroes disbanding and losing their powers, and generally depressing stuff flying all around. And then, they suddenly flash-forwarded all of their stories to a point one year later, and since this past May, they’ve been explaining the bizarre changes and the missing time in a weekly series called ‘52’, which again seems to be building up into another insanely huge crisis. This too will be collected, eventually, and I’ll try to catch up again. If you’d like a good jumping-in point, I’d try the Identity Crisis collection, and for all of the obscure characters that will pop up, I’d also suggest the enormous DC Comics Encyclopedia. It’s a worthwhile book to have to address how the characters might be related, though since the events of the Crisis, it’s probably gone a bit out of date. Does it sound unnecessarily difficult and complicated to need to keep track of a comic story with an encyclopedia? You’re not the only one who thinks so, so DC Comics will publish a Companion to help understand these events.

Don’t let that stop you, though. There are plenty of non-hero related graphic novels that deal with all kinds of subjects, often biographically. Jeffrey Brown deals with his relationships with women in tiny vignettes, in tiny books. Craig Thompson chronicles his first true romance in Blankets, which is a charmingly semi-epic and emotional exploration into love that actually, physically broke my heart. It was messy. And then there’s books like Cancer Vixen and Mom’s Cancer, which visually deal with telling the stories of people battling diseases. The classic Maus and Persepolis intelligently deal with living in war-torn countries.

Being a ‘comic’ doesn’t exclude something from being an intelligently executed work of literature, which is still a dominant perception in America. The pictures aren’t included to simplify a story, but to amplify and describe, and more often than not, to engage a viewer who might not have otherwise been so attracted by a page of words. Even more dominantly than that, the creator probably just needed to draw. So maybe you won’t be able to sell it later at a higher price, they’re good reads - something my five-foot tall stack of them will attest to. Comics like Gaiman’s Sandman have won genuine literature awards, and this week saw the publication of the very first Best American Comics 2006, from the very reputable Best American series of books. And if there’s any doubt about where to jump in, start at the beginning.

Without a doubt, my favorite graphic novel of the past ten years is Bizarro Comics, published by DC Comics in 2001.

Bizarro Comics is a 236-page compendium of wonderful, independent comic artists and writers creating their own takes on the already surreal and bizarre world of superheroes, all collected into one purple and spectacular volume. The success of this book was followed up by Bizarro World in 2005, but this first volume is forever dear to my heart. It combines the exciting world of superheroism with the subtle beauty and humor of indie comics, like an octopus who can also mix a perfect gin and tonic. Complete. You can’t ask for anything more except for maybe another gin and tonic, and keep ‘em coming until that manatee at the end of the bar looks hot.

Bizarro is a DC Comics character who is, in himself, ridiculous. He’s a pale, rocky Superman clone whose vain attempts to emulate the heroism of the original Superman are forever met with confusion and destruction. All of this is complicated further by Bizarro perpetually saying the opposite of what he really means, misunderstanding basic Earth logic and eventually returning home to his planet, Htrae. Yes, that’s ‘Earth’ spelled backwards. And for this, Bizarro is so horribly absurd that he’s gone to the far side of the ‘awful spectrum’ and returned again to the awesome end. So while Bizarro himself is a small part of the book, the premise is that Bizarro himself is drawing these comics, justifying their departure from DCU canon.

My love for this book is truly immense, and because of this, I’ve carried it around with me to any comic convention that I can get to, hunting down the artists and writers who have contributed and asking them to sign it for me. I brought it to the New York Comic Con this past weekend to meet Dean Haspiel and acquire his signature, but he was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he saw the crowd of 20,000 people and smartly fled. My attendance was not a loss, though, as I randomly encountered Kyle Baker, which was even better.

Cartoonist Kyle Baker is the reason that Bizarro Comics exists. Him and his wife, Liz Glass, collaborated on a short comic called ‘Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter’, in which a young lady babysits the baby Clark Kent for Ma and Pa Kent. Since said superbaby has superpowers, antics ensue, including an escapade with the baby finding his way into a microwave. DC Comics, it is said, found this scene to be a bit too graphic (however comedic and having no harmful effects on the exceptionally durable child), and would not publish it in a regular Superman book. It was too good to let go, so they formulated the premise of Bizarro Comics and nestled it gently between other bizarre fare. Kyle Baker ended up winning an Eisner Award for this story, one of the most highly prized awards in comics. THIS is why it was thrilling to have him sign this book along with his wife.

This totals five signatures that I’ve collected inside this book, the others being Stephen DeStephano (who illustrated the entire introduction to the book), Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer. In carting this through the city this weekend, I began to ask myself why getting these signatures was so important and exciting for me. I mean, there were a ton of other more popular artists at the convention whom I could have brought stuff to for signatures, but I was only interested in Bizarro. Getting their signatures would have increased the value of anything they were on, surely! Financial gain could be mine! But my motives were slightly more abstract than that.

One aspect of collecting these signatures is that they take up so little space, and for an avid collector such as myself, space is at a premium. Two dimensions worth of ink on a page is a breath of fresh air compared to the three-dimensions of the latest Green Arrow action figure. Beyond that still is the excitement of meeting someone who inspires you.

You open up this book to the title frontispiece, you exude admiration, and mutually, you and the artist acknowledge that in some small way, your life was changed by what they’ve created. I don’t think that any other collectible really has been as emotionally satisfying as this kind of interaction. I’m not interested in collecting signatures of actors, or signatures via the mail. For as painfully shy as I am, I draw upon the kinship of being a fellow artist and find the confidence to interact with these folks that I so admire. And I try be articulate, though that was not the case when I met Bill Sienkiewicz, during which I said something like, “buhYOU’REAMAZINGBYE!’ and stumbled away. I think I’ve settled down a bit since then.

Collecting that requires a physical experience is always more interesting than shoegazing, eBay-based collecting, as rare as it might be. I have five signatures in this book. I only have about 50 to go, and I’m almost disappointed that it’s such a small number.