Looking Forward by Michael Bailey

Author:Michael Bailey [Bailey, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael Bailey
Published: 2018-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

When I decided to open my comic shop, I struggled with a name. I wanted something that would speak to the history of the medium, yet be easy to remember. I’d just finished reading a trade paperback collecting the first few issues of The Fantastic Four, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. That’s when it hit me. If I combined each of their last names, I’d have an awesome, memorable name for the store.

Thus, Kirby Lee’s was born.

My favorite part of owning Kirby Lee’s was witnessing kids make their first comic book discovery. Most were brought in by a parent, after having just seen one of the most recent big screen blockbusters. My own obsession with the medium had started because of movies, although sci-fi and not superhero, so I could relate to how the kids felt. There was something almost magical in discovering that the adventures you had just seen on the big screen continued in print form. In a lot of ways, comics bridged the lengthy gap between a movie and its eventual sequel. I also knew that in some cases, kids developed a love of reading by starting in comics.

Those movies, along with the community outreach I had started with David after the hospital event, helped to boost my sales. There were days when I was so exhausted from work that I wanted nothing more than to drop into bed that night. My body would ache, and my brain would finally find its quiet place.

Owning my own business was a source of pride. When I was younger, my father continuously looked down on my comic collecting. It wasn’t manly enough for him. He was heavily into sports, although he had never played them in high school. He had wanted me involved in them, maybe to live vicariously through me; however, my mother had refused prior to the divorce. As a result, I never played sports. Instead, I gravitated to choir and theater. While I didn’t excel at them, I loved doing it. Theater in particular. I loved having the ability to lose myself in whatever character I was on stage, to pretend that I was someone else because I hated my life in high school so much. On stage, I could be someone other than me.

That all came to a crashing halt when my stepmother confronted me about my sexuality. Apparently, I was the stereotypical “theater fag,” unwanted in any form in her house. That, along with her constant threats to out me to my father, forced me to quit the theater.

Without the theater as an outlet to express myself, I fell more and more in love with comic collecting. I may not be able to lose myself in a character on stage, but I certainly could in the pages of The Avengers and Uncanny X-Men. They were my escape.

Opening the store had been one of the hardest decisions of my life. Comic shops were few and far between solely because there wasn’t a huge draw for them.

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