Quick Encounter

I stopped by my LCS on my lunch hour today. Not much in the way of new stuff that I wanted to pick so, coupled with the fact that my wife is no longer living with me (which is still upsetting me to no end, but that's another issue...), I went ahead and picked up Lost Girls.

Then I hit a nearby Subway for lunch, and was getting my drink behind this ancient woman. I didn't ask how old she was, but she was one of those that people who had so many wrinkles, you couldn't really distinguish any of her actual features. Anyway, we're getting our drinks at about the same time, and she sees the Comic Shop News I brought in to scan through while I was eating; it had a big picture of Little Lulu showing and she asked what it was.

"It's a newsletter about comic books."

"Oh, I'd forgotten about those."

Now maybe she really was so old that she had stopped reading comics by the time Little Lulu had been created in 1935. Maybe it had really been that long since her children stopped reading comics before that whole business with Wertham and Kefauver in the 1950s that comics, for this woman, were insignificant, even non-existent, for most of her life. That would suggest she'd never seen a comic colored on a computer. Or one with advertisements for cars inside them. Or one printed on even half-way decent paper. She'd probably never thought that comics should be kept longer than it took to read them. She almost certainly had no idea there was a comic book shop just around the corner.

And that's when I was quite thankful to have left Lost Girls in the car!

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