Today is my birthday.

Kind of.

It’s complicated.

I was born on February 29, 1976, which not only makes me a bicentennial baby but also a leap baby. This means that three years out of every four, I have to decide when to actually celebrate my birthday because in those non-leap years the day I was born literally doesn’t exist.

I blame the Earth’s rotation around the sun and how we measure time. Because that’s why leap years exist. We say that a year is 365 days but really a year is 365.2422 days, which means that there are six (or so) extra hours a year and if we didn’t add a day at the end of February every four years then the calendar we currently use would drift twenty-five days every century.

So, because of those six extra hours a year and keeping our precious calendar running “correctly” and because I just happen to be born on that extra day, birthday celebrations for me and my ilk are weird.

You’re welcome, by the way.

Anyway, being a leap baby isn’t actually that much of a problem. Outside of the, “When do you celebrate your birthday?” questions and the “I’ve never met a leap baby,” comments and the “I was friends with/my (fill in the type of relative here) was a leap baby,” comments and the most common question, which is, “So, how old are you really?” it’s not a bad card to pull from the deck. The only real issue I ever had was when I was applying for a job back in 2003. The computer the company used for the application refused to acknowledge that February 29th existed. It would not let me advance beyond that part of the application until I lied and said I was born on March 1st.

This year I’m turning fifty, which has led to a little bit of that good, old-fashioned existential examination. I haven’t been staring into the void (which I don’t like to do, because often it stares back and that is creepy) but there has been a weird mix of thinking about where I’ve been and where I could go. The great thing about turning fifty is that I have a lot of life experience and that has made me more laid back about certain things and angrier about others. The bad thing is the realization that I don’t have as many years in front of me as I do behind me.

(shrugs) It’s a thing.

One of the areas I’ve been thinking about is my relationship to comics and super-heroes. I’ve been a fan of super-heroes for literally as long as I can remember. I’ve been collecting and reading comics for nearly forty years. I have spent a lot of time, money, and energy amassing comics, reading comics, talking about comics, writing about comics, and podcasting about comics. At one point I had well over 20,000 books in my collection and seven or so years ago I got rid of most of them because I did the math and realized that there was no way I could read all of them before the end comes. At one point I was invested in the weekly grind of going to the shop, picking up my books, and reading them as well as following the latest news and gossip in the industry. Now I’m what I call semi-retired. I’ll poke my head into the room every once in a while, but for the most part I’m either reading books I never had the chance to during my serious collecting days or re-reading books that I loved, again, during my collecting days.

It’s kind of weird. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I was convinced that I would always love comics the same way I loved during that time period. Now I look back and think, “Oh sweet summer child,” because I’ve learned that every fan has a shelf life and that once you accept that you can retain the love you have for comics without turning into a bitter old man, yelling at clouds like some fanboy version of Abe Simpson.

It’s a weird road to navigate. I still have strong opinions about certain character and stories, but I also understand that nuance is a thing and that those opinions are shaped by my own development as a fan. I also understand that the medium has to change and evolve if it is going to survive. I also understand that new readers and fans have to enter the chat to keep the culture going. I also understand that they are going to have opinions that I either don’t relate to or that I disagree with, but I can’t really engage with them because I’m worried I’ll sound like the old guy in the corner telling them that they’re doing everything wrong or that I’ll once again be like Abe Simpson and tell them I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was and that one day it will happen to them too.

Or I’ll be the Abe Simpson that is telling them long boring stories about what it was like when I wore an onion on my belt.

Which, as you may or may not know, was the style of the time.

It’s kind of weird how a lot of what I worry about can be summed up in Simpsons quotes.

(Fun aside, the best part of watching younger fans get all worked up is that it reminds me when I was like that. While the creative teams change, the stories evolve, and the companies experience upheavals on the editorial side of things, fans still complain about the same things now that my friends and I complained about back in “my day”. It’s kind of amusing really. Like, I understand the passion, but only as someone that once felt the same way, so now it is more academic. Now that I’m not as invested it’s easier to step back and take a clearer look. It’s kind of wild.)

The one thing that I am certain about is that I still love super heroes and comic books as much as I did back when I was a kid. I know there are people that think I should have grown out of it by this point, but I haven’t and given that the world is on fire, no one in charge knows what they are doing, and that it’s easy to get lost in the existential dread I need an escape to take my mind off things so I don’t get lost in it. I still like the characters and the stories and doing deeper dives into the different companies and eras is a lot of fun, so what’s the harm, right?

The original idea for this post was to write out a list of things I plan to do as a comic book reader that is entering his fifties, but now that I’m getting towards the end of this piece, I realize that there isn’t any point in doing so. Outside of continuing to produce the podcasts I host or co-host, doing Superman Homepage Live just about every Monday night with Steve and Marc, and posting stuff on this site I’m just going to play it by ear. I can be very mercurial, and any list I come up with could be thrown out because my attention has been drawn elsewhere, so I should just steer into the skid and see where it takes me.

Only time will tell if this plan is going to work.

And how many more Simpsons quotes will become more relevant.

More to follow…