I was sixteen back in the summer of 1992 and had my first job. McDonald’s.

As first jobs go, it wasn’t bad. I hated that my hands smelled like onions at the end of a shift, but I liked the people I worked with and learned one of the most important lessons you can learn…to hate the phrase, “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.”

I want to track down the first person to ever say that and ask them how they felt the first time those words came out of their mouths. Was it just a casual, off the cuff type situation where they said it and just went on with their life? Did they stop and soak in the moment, realizing they have just uttered a sentence that will live on beyond them, effectively making them immortal? Were they a good manager that said it jokingly? Were they a sociopath that soaked in the misery they inflicted on their people?

I’ll never know, but I will hate it for the rest of my life. I’ve been in management positions for the bulk of my working life and I can say, with certainty, that saying this to a subordinate in this day and age will result in said subordinate looking as if you were from another planet and had three heads.

True story.

Anyway, because I had a job I had more disposable income and thus I could buy more comics. Four of those comics celebrated Spider-Man’s 30th birthday.

I’m fond of saying that the nineties get a bad rap when it comes to mainstream comics. Some of it is justified. Some of it is buyer’s remorse on the part of the person that went all in on the excesses of the earlier part of the decade. I can’t say everything was great, but a lot of it was fun and the four oversized issues of the four Spider-Man titles were a lot of fun.

The stories inside vary in quality and enjoyment. By far Amazing Spider-Man #365 was the best as a package but the main story in Spectacular Spider-Man #189 was the best in terms of writing. The holograms on the covers were neat. I liked them. Did I think they were the best thing ever? No, but sixteen-year-old me thought they were kind of cool and, more importantly, did their job. They stood out on the racks and made me want to buy the issues. Which I did.

The posters that were in the issues were neat as well and two of them ended up on my bedroom wall.

Speaking of posters, there was an awesome promo poster for the books and Spider-Man’s 30th birthday in general that I got from a friend back in the 2000s. It is my absolute favorite Spider-Man poster ever, mostly because of the Mark Bagley art.

I bought a lot of comics I wouldn’t have normally purchased during that summer. It was the first time I really tried to branch out in my reading. And it was a really good summer for comics in general. The Spider-Man books stand out in my memory because they were a lot of fun.

I’m not suggesting that comics need to go back to this sort of thing. Everyone deserves their own era. And, as my friend Tom Panarese is fond of saying, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Sometimes it blinds you to the realities that you need to face. Sometimes it blinds you to the quality of a comic or book or movie or song.

Sometimes it provides a momentary respite from a world on fire.

Spider-Man’s 30th birthday is the last one. At least for me.

More to follow…