This saturday, I spent Php 2500 -yes- on 2 comic books. The more expensive one costs Php 1800 and it was a hardbound copy of Marvel's Secret War. In it, was a tale of espionage as well as one of the best art conceptualizations I've laid my eyes on since Alex Ross' Kingdom Come. It had awesome features like interviews with Nick Fury (who I have grown to respect from this comic) as well as statistics of the characters involved. I have yet to finish the book because I have read the other one first and that, my dear readers, was Identity Crisis.

How did you grow up? I grew up on comic books, like many of the bards out there. I also grew up on Saturday morning cartoons like the majority of my generation yet the few of us who were also raised between the pages of 50 peso comic books, I deemed, were of a different loft from all the others. I have not met all of them but I have met some and they were very fast to become friends with. All I had to say was, I grew up on Spiderman and that was it. I based everything on those pages -- there wasn't any time for me to learn values on my own, as my parents were always busy, but at least I had an idea on the things I ought to do. Fight for what's right. Justice Prevails. Good guys always win. Three basic rules that every avid fan takes to heart every time they get up from bed. Yet these stories and tales back in the day hid something from us, its children, and that was how hard it was to believe in those three rules.

You never realize just how much was going on. You read dialogues and see punches flying but you never realize why. I never realized how hard it was for Spidey to clock his best friend for killing his first love. Neither was it hard for Cap to be a man out of time, where he was threatened to be nothing more than a glorified symbol. Neither did I realize that there would be no closure for Batman in his one man crusade against the people who killed his parents. They all just seemed to backgrounds back in the day. Something to push the heroes to heroism. A cool origin to get the readers interested. It never dawned on me... that they were only human dealing with very human situations.

It's very hard to deal with life as it is. I broke down some years back and didn't know what to do, that was until I read some comics about how things -indeed- change. That was the most revelating thing I have encountered in my life. The universe I grew up in, didn't betray me. It grew up with me. That's the amazing thing... I don't have to grow up alone. I am distressed between the rules of this life and the rules I believe in but you know, superheroes go through all that and they're just as distressed as I am. Life is unfair, Love is cruel and Good doesn't always win the battle - those were the things clashing my predisposition. These were things to be accepted and later, embraced because you won't get through without keeping these things in heart. Even my heroes have to bend to it, much less, I. That's where change comes in - where growing up comes in.

The more I see my heroes become human, the more I think I can stand on my own two feet. They were once gods, once symbols, once beings far bigger than any of us but now, I think I'm finally catching up and I come to the realization that, they were just people after all and that they just had the advantage of being timeless. All the battles they fought between pages as well as the drama they portray which seemed to me like some fairy tale when I was a kid, were just real life in drawing. Even if their story is repeated, the details are often lost until we look back 10 or so years later to see that this was their story you're living in.

So was this an epiphany? I don't think so. It's something I have repeated over and over and something I keep forgetting. I have had a lot of shit to get through and feeling needy happened to be one of them. To hell with that. I know deep down in my gut, that I can get through on my own two feet and for those times where they get too hard, I can always call the cavalry.