Celebrated my niece’s second birthday today, which was nice. My mom gave me an office chair that she found uncomfortable and which seems like a vast improvement over the last one I was using, but we’ll see how it holds up over the next few days.
I also gave my brother back is copy of Batman #430. It’s cover-dated February 1989. It’s the first Batman comic published after “A Death in the Family,” the famous story that killed the second Robin as a result of a 1-900 number reader poll. (Am I the only one who remembers news stories about Robin’s death like they were last month?) It was also the comic he bought when he started collecting comics, and he started a month or so before I did. So it’s the beginning of a hobby and a collection that’s been part of our family for two decades. Since he decided not to collect Batman as a regular title and I did, he traded it to me somewhere along the line. He was younger than my daughter is now when he bought it. Now he has a daughter of his own. The cover has a couple of folds and wrinkles. The pages are a little yellow. The story’s been written out of continuity by at least a couple of universe-changing events DC Comics has published in the last 20 years. But in spite of that – maybe because of that – he wanted it back, and I was happy to give it to him.
He’s promised to give me another copy, which is certainly a fair trade. To be honest, I’m just glad he gave me a reason to pull it out of its longbox and relive the memories.