bye bye birdy

The cardinal is gone.  The nest is hanging upside-down from the trellis, and I hope it was only temporary housing while her mate built them a condo in (an) Aspen (tree).
In Summer 1989, I went to stay with my family in Buffalo, Mo.  It wasn't my first choice but that whole moving-to-England thing didn't work out.  Though I knew my mom & stepdad had their issues, I was happy to be spending time with my siblings, and the isolationist in me looked forward to being in the middle of nowhere.  It turned into five months of walking dirt roads, babysitting, reading Ray Bradbury books, cleaning up shrapnel from moonshine-fueled altercations, and waiting for various friends to break me out.
On one of those long weekends, Imma handed me a stack of comics and said, "This is Sandman.  You should read it."  Or something like that.  And she was so right.  Sandman lead me to Hellblazer, which lead me to Swamp Thing.  Somehow Animal Man & DP snuck in to the mix, and there has been no turning back.  I am often thankful that my gateway drug was that perfect because I had always thought superheroes were stupid, a bias that could have left me quite deprived.
A few years ago, most of the titles I read had ended and I started picking up some new stuff.  Wow, have I had some disappointments.  But there have also been some very pleasant surprises.  "The Unwritten" and "iZombie" are two that I almost avoided because the subject matter seemed so tired at first but they both quickly became favorites.  Grant Morrison drafted a different map of Metropolis and Gotham, which I'm still trying to traverse.
It has now been a year since the DC relaunch and I am subscribed to more comics than ever.  Some have been really good and some have been the kind of action-packed soap opera that bores me to death.  And now that I've been revisiting the holy grails of my collection, I'm amazed at the difference in quality.  There is so much more story packed in to these older titles, more detail to pick up on in the art, more to think about.  Some of these new books are all "bang!  splat!" & "pick up next month's confusing crossover with one of the comics you don't read!"
Anyway, thank you Imma for getting me hooked.  Thank you Ray Bradbury for bringing so much magic to my little world.