I first got into comics in what you might consider an odd way. One Christmas (that I place around 2013, putting me at the spry age of 7), my parents got me the 2009 Marvel Encyclopedia. Why they did this, I’m not certain. My guess is that at the time I must’ve loved watching some Marvel cartoon that my young, malleable mind barely comprehended, but saw the funny guys in suits and kept watching anyway. When I first cracked open the book, my mind was blown away. “Wait,” I probably thought to myself “there are more superheroes and supervillains than just Spider-Man and Green Goblin?!?!” As I rapidly flipped through the pages, each new costumed character brought more and more delight, until I found one character so incredible, so spectacular, so fantastic that I was stopped dead in my tracks. No, it wasn’t Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man or even Iron Fist, it was Goldbug.
Now, some of you may be asking “Why, out of the hundreds of characters in that book, did you think Goldbug was the coolest?” The rest of you, which I suspect makes up the majority of this article’s readership, are probably asking “Who in the holy hell is Goldbug anyways?” Goldbug was this guy, Matthew Gilden, who dresses like a beetle, has a flying beetle ship (hey, wait a minute), and robs banks for their gold. He also happens to have a gun that turns people into gold, but why he never thought to just sell the people he turns into gold was beyond my seven-year-old self and is still beyond me today. What made him so special to me was that he was weird. His biography in the encyclopedia was maybe a paragraph long, with a tiny image of Goldbug in all of his gilded glory (taken from the cover of the “iconic-to-me” Peter Parker Spectacular Spider-Man #62). I could tell immediately that he was some obscure loser that no one really cared about, so I took it upon my young self to give this guy the love he deserves, and to my parent’s dismay, that’s about all I ever
talked about for months.
Flash forward 6 months, I’m sitting in the middle of the floor of my living room. It was a warm summer day. The heat wasn’t stifling, but it was hot enough to have all the windows and doors open. I remember that day quite vividly, after all, it marked the official start of my greatest passion. I was reading some book about some strange topic when my dad came through the front door holding an orange envelope, and sat down in the old rocking chair. I knew what was inside that package, and I’m sure my dad knew I knew, but he tried to convince me it was a CD he ordered online. Foolish man! How dare he try to pull the wool over the eyes of an aspiring comic fanatic? Does he not know we comic nerds are a finer stock of people? We are the Númenóreans of geekdom! While I desired to strike down my father for his insolence, I instead decided to show mercy and accept his teasing, eventually getting the package handed to me after uttering a quick word of thanks. Ripping open the package with all the expected fervor of a now eight-year-old. After viciously emptying my paper-and-cardboard enemy of its bubble-wrapped innards, I was rewarded with my childhood grail: Luke Cage Power Man #41, written by Marv Wolfman with pencils by Lee Elias, the first appearance of Goldbug. It held no real monetary value, but to me, as I gently held it in my small hands and flipped through its cracked, yellowing contents, it meant the world.
Nearly a decade after that fateful day, my comic collection has grown considerably, my love of comics growing along with it. My life has changed considerably, with high school ending and college just around the corner (and going from buying stuff from my favorite comic store to still buying stuff from my favorite comic store but also now writing for it), but my passion for comics and for the strange and unusual will always be around. So, thanks Marv and Lee, you guys’ rock.
