The Orion Online

Issue date: 12/3/08 Section: Entertainment

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As a child, comic books can reshape reality. The older you get, the more jaded you become and before you know it, all those fun memories of super soldiers and vanquished villains are replaced with group presentations and bills.

Not for me.

Since moving to Chico, I found myself regressing toward childhood as a way of dealing with my new surroundings. I started drinking Martinelli's apple juice, played video games until 5 in the morning and buying comics again.

Luckily, Chico has an incredible resource in BaT Comics & Games, nestled downtown among the lunchtime hotspots.

When I drove around town before I decided to move here, I saw the store in its former location, closer to 7-Eleven. Seeing a comic book store around the corner from school was a mark in the "win" column for me.

My first semester contained a time gap between sociology and history, and I filled that gap with a pina colada Slurpee and Green Lantern trade.

For those not acquainted, BaT Comics provides all sorts of entertainment, from comics and manga to board games and collectible card games. The atmosphere is warm and educational, and owner Trent Walsh can give you a crash course in any series you may have dropped out of for a while.

That is the thing with comics - the less time you put into them, the more overwhelmed you can become with the changes and evolution of each series.

There was a solid decade in which I did not so much as even think about comics. But with the consistent creation of high quality, big-budget movies, creative writers swapping from television shows and comics and shake-ups in the Marvel and DC universes, I found myself dying to get to know the friends I had forgotten so long ago.

I went in and told them I hadn't read anything in years, and trusted the opinions of the customers and employees to point me in the right direction. I feared my beloved heroes had gone the way of some of the more recent tragedies. Captain America is dead, Batman is giving up the ghost and who knows who is even in the X-Men anymore.

During my last stop inside the store, an older fellow stopped outside the window, gazing inwardly toward the life-sized Spider-Man cutout and all the colorful things inside. He slowly grazed inside, and after asking what he was looking for, he repeated my fear out loud.

"They ain't like they used to be," he said, depressed.

Luckily, Walsh is used to this sort of nostalgic pessimism, and quickly figured out the man's favorite characters and informed him that issues are still being printed and that his favorite hero is still gallivanting around the world, fighting evil and doing good.

"People think that all of their favorites are gone, but that just isn't true," Walsh said. "You can still follow your favorites even today."

That's the nice thing about being a comic fan: The other fans are always willing to help you out. Sure, you have your elitists and biased gatekeepers trying desperately to sway you from reading their favorites, as to not sour them with your untrained eye. You find this sort of mentality from time to time, but generally comic book fans love that someone else loves what they love. Feel the love?

With a couple books in hand and some time to kill, I managed to fill most of 2008 with some form of graphic entertainment. The best thing I rediscovered was how cheap this stuff is.

Coffee is more than five bucks, movies cost half a day's paycheck, new DVDs are even more expensive and forget about paying for gas to go somewhere else to have fun. Your standard comic is $2.99, and a trade - a compilation of consecutive issues, sometimes covering an entire story arc - is less than $20.

They hit you on all fronts, not just the obvious visual engagement. The feel of a comic, the smell of the ink and, of course, the most important sense, the imagination in the mind of the reader. While big budget movies might give you all of that, the difference is they are shaping the imagination for you, and you can no longer wonder what Iron Man sounds like or how tall The Hulk can really get. Hollywood has answered all of those questions for us.

I am not sure how much longer Chico will be my city of residence, but I know that until it's time for me to leave, much time will be spent at my local comic book shop, falling back into a world that I know and love.

Jesse Seilhan can be reached at
jseilhan@theorion.com

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