I’m about to start re-reading Love & Rockets. Thinking back on when I first got hooked on Love & Rockets makes me feel so, so old. There was no Internet. There was no Amazon. I had no idea of its existence until I asked a comic book store guy for something “interesting and different” and he pressed the first collected volume into my hands. I took it home, spent the night reading it, and came back the next day for every other volume he had in stock.

Love & Rockets was never a mainstream success; it wasn’t even all that popular among alternative comics fans. It was a true cult classic, supported by a small but devoted circle who quietly evangelized it in the form of approving nods. (In the late 80s, bringing a copy of Love & Rockets up to the counter was how you demonstrated to the clerk that you were serious business.)

Funny thing, even now in the Internet era where every obscure object of interest has its online community, there isn’t a huge presence of L&R fans. I suspect it fell into a generational void somewhere inside Gen-X, where most of the people who were into it hardcore had lost touch with the title by the time people were getting into fan forums and such. Plus, at some point Los Bros Hernandez started publishing new issues maybe once a year, and it’s hard to maintain a fan base that way.

Anyway. I’ve been meaning to start this re-read since something like 2008, but I keep putting it off. Thinking about Love & Rockets actually makes me incredibly sad, for reasons that are impossible to adequately articulate.

I’m not one of those reactionaries who thinks we were all better off before the Internet, but life felt different back then, in a way that’s probably gone forever, and oftentimes I feel sad for that loss. I remember trying to collect all the Charles Bukowski books in print at the time. I had to go to an independent bookstore on State Street and borrow the latest Books in Print from the owner, look up each ISBN, and fill out a little card to place an order. A couple of weeks later I’d get a call that the books were in the store.

A couple of weeks! Jesus. Can you even imagine?⁽¹⁾ Now, of course, I have the entire collected works of Bukowski in ebook form on my Kindle app.

Maybe I’m feeling that nostalgia (“The pain from an old wound” — Don Draper) for Love & Rockets because Love & Rockets is itself an inherently nostalgic title. Over the course of the series, characters age out of their youth and spend most of their adulthood pining for the good old days — the same good old days we yearn for, both as readers and ourselves.

Maybe because, as I revisit Love & Rockets, I know it won’t be the same.

Or maybe because it reminds me of a time when my life and attention were so uncluttered that literally all I had going on at any given time were school, social life, and whatever thing I was currently obsessed with.

I could unclutter my life that way again. Of course I could. But it wouldn’t be the same. I’d know. Being 18, being away from home for the first time, being alone in a strange city. It’s a time and a state of mind that are lost to me forever. All I can do is sit here — weirdly, I am completely sober as I write this — and wallow in the pain of remembrance.

Notes
(1) Now, of course, I have the entire collected works of Bukowski in ebook form on my Kindle app.