Good friend Larry Nemecek and me celebrating Comic-Con 2026.

When I was 11 years old, my mother insisted to my father that we needed to move. They sold our house in Devonshire, NJ, along with the house he’d built next door for his mother, and we moved 12 miles away, to Galloway, NJ, then known as Absecon Highlands.

All so that I might have some friends.

Where we’d been, there wasn’t anyone for me to play with. We weren’t close to school (so my grandmother drove me there every day), and no other kids lived around us. In front of our house was a strip of highway, while in back of us were acres and acres of thick woods split briefly by mostly unused railroad tracks. Occasionally, my dad would get together with his best friend Gus, and I’d see Gus’s son Glenn, but Glenn was a few years older and not really a friend.

My true friends were comic books. 

I had inherited a few from my eldest brother (much older than me, and long out of the house), and any chance I got, I’d add more. I lived, breathed, ate, and dreamed comic books.

After we moved, I made friends with the boy across the street, the boy at the end of the street, the boy in the house to the left, and even, occasionally, some kids at school — a school I could walk to. (And I started to realize that actual real-life friendship didn’t quite work the way it did in Marvel comics, where the Thing and the Human Torch were constantly squabbling, and where Spider-Man was a wise-cracking jackass. If you know me in person, you know this is a lesson I still haven’t fully absorbed. Unfortunately.)

Once I had friends, I realized how important friendship is to me. Because now I knew what it meant:  A friend was someone you could do things with together. You could race your dirtbikes out in the woods with friends. You could build a treehouse together. You could go see a movie together. You could dig underground tunnels with a friend. (It collapsed on a third friend. The other two of us frantically dug him out.) You could go camping with friends. You could, on occasion, get into a fistfight with a friend. After a few years, you could talk about girls with your friends. At some point, older friends could sneak you into bars before you’d reached drinking age. The options were endless.

Every year since 1988, I’ve attended San Diego Comic-Con, and from the start, I’ve been doing it with friends. That first year there were two of us. Some years, we’ve had as many as eight of us joining up to attend together, and sometimes I’ve brought my children, when they were actual children, or teens, or even into adulthood. But recently I’ve wondered if maybe this year or that year wouldn’t be my last year. Thirty-eight years is a long time to be doing something; was it time to let it go? I still read comic books, but most of the creators I’d care to see, meet, or listen to have died off, and attending this thing is expensive and quite an effort. Whenever you plop down 150,000-plus people in one constrained area, it’s got to be a bit trying.  To say little of the expense:  easily $1,000 (that’s the hotel room alone). Plus $80 just to park (!), plus the meals, the drinks, and whatever I might buy.

But last night, in our room with two good friends of decades (I’ve known Travis for 30 years, and Larry for 20) who’ve also been coming to this event off and on for decades, as we talked and laughed and joked until two in the morning, and shared how the original “Star Trek” so thoroughly programmed us into believing in the future and shuddering at the recognition of just how far away from the reality of a peace-building, cooperative Federation we are right now, I recalled just why this event is so important to me.

It’s about comic books AND friends.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2026 at 10:26 am and is filed under Comics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.