I picked up some great comics from a long-lived comic shop: Comics for Collectors in Ithaca, NY. Believe it or not, I used to get my comics from this store when I was in college. My recent visit remined me of that old saying by Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
I have another version of that one. Let me improve upon Heraclitus. I don’t think he’d mind. If you think about it, “No fan ever steps into the same comic shop twice, there aren’t the same comics there, and they’re not the same fan.”

I did purchase a bunch of wonderful comics: Titan’s Conan, Dynamite’s Space Ghost, Mark Waid’s Superboy in Action Comics, Tom King’s Wonder Woman, an old issue of Gray Morrow’s Red Circle Sorcery. I’m not regularly buying DC’s Green Lantern series, but there were two consecutive issues on the rack, so I decided to give it a try.

I was so …underwhelmed. It was NOT my cup of tea. The art was childish (tough to choke down at $5 bucks an issue) and the characters, including Batman, Flash and Green Lantern himself, were all so goofy and irresponsible.

I was outraged; I tell you! “How could the powers that be let this happen to this great series, Green Lantern? It was so cutting-edge recently!?!” And by recently I mean it was cutting edge over 50 years ago.

Clearly this new iteration wasn’t meant for me. But hold that thought for a moment.

Flashback with me to the previous day. I had a conversation with a football fan, (an older fan, but still younger than me) who was outraged by his team’s new season ticket pricing. He was also outraged by Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime performance. “That’s also slap in the face to longtime fans like me”, he ranted.

I told him that Bad Bunny is fun and he should give him a try. But he wasn’t buying it. There may have been some politics involved, but I think he just wanted to be coddled in his personal nostalgia and expected/demanded the outside world consistently do the same.

His loss, I shrugged. I don’t think it works that way.

But then I connected the dots on those Green Lantern issues. In that scenario, I was the fan who resisted change. I was the fan who yearned for a new issue of Green Lantern to be just like an old Denny O’Neil + Neal Adams issue of Green Lantern. Or a John Broome + Gil Kane issue. Or even a Marv Wolfman + Joe Staton issue.

I got news for us all, especially for the man in the mirror: There ain’t gonna be no more new Denny O’Neil + Neal Adams comics.

And if the new creative team on Green Lantern isn’t to my liking, there are still about a zillion other wonderful new comics, and collected editions/reprints, to thrill and delight me. Even this particular publisher, DC, has lots. I can skip Green Lantern but I’m can still enjoy Tom King’s Wonder Woman and Dan Slott’s Superman Unlimited. I can’t wait for the new Vertigo books, especially Chris Condon’s The Brutal Dark.

I hope I caught myself, and course corrected, before the world-at-large heard me whine.

I don’t ever want to be that guy complaining about a halftime show that is personal insult to me. I’m sure you don’t want to be that guy either.