go.Jimmy.go

I can still remember it like it was yesterday.

It was the spring of 1984. I was fourteen years old, and my parents had just paid for my very first subscription to The Amazing Spider-Man comic book.

I’m pretty sure they did it less out of generosity and more because they were tired of hearing me ask for sixty cents every month—and probably equally tired of me pestering the people at the local drugstore about when the newest issue was coming in.

Eventually, they surrendered. They wrote a check for $7.20 (equivalent to a million dollars to a kid in 1984), mailed it off, and somewhere in the vast machinery of Marvel Comics, my subscription was officially born.

Now all I had to do was wait.

And wait.

I was a Spider-Man fan from way back. As far back as I can remember, actually. Granted, I’m guessing my reliable memory only goes back to about age four, so technically I’d had only been a fan for around ten years.

But why ruin a good story with math? The truth is, if it had anything to do with Spider-Man, I wanted in.

Maybe part of the reason I connected with Peter Parker was because he wasn’t Superman. He wasn’t some muscle-bound god from another planet. Peter was awkward. He was a little nerdy. People underestimated him.

In other words, I could relate.

Here was a guy everyone considered a dork who suddenly found himself with the abilities of a spider. He could climb walls, swing between buildings and beat the living daylights out of bad guys—all while wearing the coolest red-and-blue costume ever created.

What fourteen-year-old kid wouldn’t want that? Especially a dorky one.

Just how serious was my Spider-Man obsession?

Here are a few examples.

I remember literally running home from school to watch the old Spider-Man cartoons from the 1960s. Although even as a kid, I occasionally wondered whether the people making those cartoons had gotten into some wild mushrooms before coming to work. Some of those psychedelic scenes were pretty wild.

My brother and I shared a bedroom growing up, and he occasionally claimed he had to wake me in the middle of the night because I was dreaming I was Spider-Man and trying to climb the walls.

I still haven’t forgiven him. Come on, bro. I WAS SPIDER-MAN!

A neighborhood friend and I even made our own Spider-Man movies with an 8mm camera, complete with homemade costumes and what I’m sure were some truly groundbreaking special effects.

And when the live-action The Amazing Spider-Man television series came along in the late 1970s, I endured plenty of ridicule for watching it.

You took your lumps as a Spidey fan back then. Which brings me back to that subscription.

Once my parents mailed that check, I eagerly checked the mailbox every day.

Nothing.

Days became weeks.

Still nothing.

Don’t forget, there was no Internet back then and no number to dial to check on your subscription, unless you wanted to spend a fortune on long distance.

Even so, I kept the faith. Spider-Man wouldn’t let me down. He’d show up eventually in his red and blue jammies—just like the old cartoon theme song promised.

Then one afternoon, it happened.

I opened the mailbox and saw a comic book wrapped inside one of those plain brown paper subscription covers.

SPIDEY WAS HERE!

I raced inside and tore open the wrapper, being extra careful not to damage whatever masterpiece awaited me.

My imagination was already running wild.

Maybe Spider-Man would be battling Doctor Octopus. Maybe the Green Goblin or Dr. Doom would be on the cover. Maybe Mary Jane Watson would be dangling precariously from the side of a building while some villain laughed maniacally and Spidey desperately tried to reach her.

Whatever it was, I knew it was going to be glorious.

Then I saw the cover.

The Amazing Spider-Man #252.

And my excitement disappeared.

What the hell was THIS?

Spider-Man was wearing a BLACK COSTUME.

Not red and blue.

Black.

The cover even teased a “new Spider-Man” and rumors about some mysterious new costume.

Rumors? What rumors? Nobody told me anything. I didn’t get that memo.

My first thought was that somebody at the comic book subscription department had screwed up. Maybe my parents checked the wrong box on the order form. Maybe Marvel had accidentally sent me some other Spider-Man comic. Because this certainly wasn’t my Spider-Man.

I quickly flipped through the issue, desperately searching for the familiar red-and-blue costume.

Nothing.

Apparently, Spider-Man had returned from some adventure with a brand-new black costume, and fourteen-year-old me was having none of it.

This was an imposter. A fraud. Some dark-costumed pretender masquerading as my friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

So I did what any completely rational fourteen-year-old comic-book fan would do.

I threw it in the garbage.

There is, however, one tiny footnote to this story.

That sixty-cent comic book I threw away in 1984? The one that Spidey received during Secret Wars and inevitably became Venom? Today, a nice copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #252 is worth hundreds of dollars.

Wonderful.

Apparently, with great power also comes the responsibility of not throwing valuable comic books in the trash.

Looking back, though, I have nothing but great memories of growing up with Spider-Man.

We still get together whenever a new movie comes out. I still have much of my old comic-book collection tucked away, including plenty of great back issues of my boy. One of them is NOT The Amazing Spider-Man #252, thank you very much.

I even transferred those old homemade 8mm Spider-Man movies to DVD years ago, preserving my brief but distinguished career as a cinematic superhero.

I’m considering releasing them someday.

$9.99 an episode. No refunds.

Eventually, of course, Spider-Man found his way back into the familiar red and blue. But it took a few years, and by then the emotional damage had already been done.

I had spent a good portion of my teenage years watching my favorite superhero run around in what looked like a black unitard.

But we survived.

Spidey came home.

And somewhere out there, perhaps sitting safely inside a plastic sleeve in someone’s carefully curated comic-book collection, is a pristine copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #252.

Mine, meanwhile, spent 1984 buried beneath coffee grounds, banana peels and whatever else happened to be in our kitchen garbage that week.

Somewhere, Peter Parker is probably shaking his head at me.

And honestly? I deserve it.

*****

One More Thing…

Speaking of things I’ve waited a long time for…

My new novel, The Seventh Echo, arrives August 18.

It’s a supernatural suspense story about returning home, confronting the secrets we leave behind, and discovering that sometimes the past has been waiting for us all along.

Paperback and Kindle editions are available for pre-order now.

Every echo begins with a secret.