Day Sixty-six - Black Mirror

Let's catch up on some loose ends. As I go about my writing, it's only natural that sometimes things end falling through the cracks, and I fail to remember them. Sometimes I'll think of something in particular that I'd not written about, but I always end up deeming it too irrelevant. If it wasn't relevenat to my life, it sure as hell won't be to this narrative. But some other things and events, them I have to give their proper due. One of those very omissions I want to address here is someone I met back in '94. Let's call him R., shall we? Now, to put things into context, around that time was when I first started collecting comics in earnest. And back then, we only had the one store in town, and they didn't carry a lot of comics. Oh, you could put whatever you wanted on a standing order, but they had a minimum of ten titles, and I couldn't afford to buy that many on a regular basis. Eventually, though, a dissatisfied ex customer of theirs, who also had the good fortune of possessing the necessary loot to back it up, opened a store of his own. But this was even less of a store than the one we already had : the new one was just a bit of his own office converted into a store front, while the other we had before was originally and mainly a graphic design store who also stocked some comics. But this new one had a lot of back issues, and they had a wider variety of comics. And eventually they'd start distributing to other vendors throughout the city. It might have been in one of these vendors that R. and I first met - I believe S. was there as well, but they never got to know each other very well, I don't think. But me and him got along famously, and though he lived a bit far from where we lived, he'd come over often either to buy comics or just to visit and hang out. He also had a couple of friends who'd come with him, one would be around our age, and the other a bit younger, maybe by a few years. He'd be in his early teens, a lanky, small kid who - as far as I know - eventually fell into hard drugs. I haven't heard anything about in close to thirty years now, so who knows what happened to him? But R., he was invaluable presence in my life back then because he'd show me a lot of comics I'd have not checked otherwise - stuff like Preacher and Stray Bullets. It was also through him that I first saw 'The Crow' and got to know Tarantino. We kept a distant friendship throughout the years, even going to the movies on a double date when I was going out with Dora and he with a girl who I think might have been called Nadia. As with so much in life, people end up drifting apart, and I eventually came to learn that he'd moved abroad, and when I still had social media, we talked sometimes. But he was one of the catalysts in '94-'95 that started me going down a different path regarding the comics I was reading and buying.