When I was about 10 or so, a new neighbour moved into the empty house opposite my parents' in Tableland, a village in South Trinidad. This neighbour, a man who seemed close to seven feet tall, invited my uncle and me to his place one evening. I believe he wanted to show my uncle some of the renovations he had done. Once inside, I was impressed: The house's exterior was no different from the others in the village - small, boxy, wooden and with an obligatory porch - but the neighbour had knocked away some of the inside walls and had painted the kitchen in a variety of shocking colours. While he chatted with my uncle, I wandered around trying to guess how he had managed to get the huge couch and dining room table through the small front door.
I must have seemed bored with the pair's talk of renovations, because the neighbour pointed to the single interior door on our left and said there were some "nice story books" inside. When I entered the room, I saw a woman sitting on a bed. She was nursing a baby. This was the first time I had seen the mother and her child, and I hesitated by the doorway. "Below the bed," the neighbour shouted, and the woman spread her legs. In this awkward position, I knelt and pulled out a huge cardboard box. My embarrassment melted as I glimpsed the double row of comic books inside. I dragged the box to the corner of the room, close to a table with three sturdy legs and a fourth that seemed to be a broom handle.
My excitement grew as I rifled through the contents. In the village shops, I had often seen old dusty comics, mostly Marvel and DC, attached with clothes clips to nylon cords strung high on the walls, almost touching the ceiling, but in the neighbour's cardboard box, I saw Charlton and Dell and Gold Key. Most were Westerns: Jonah Hex and Rawhide Kid and Two Gun Kid. I must have sat there for an hour or so, browsing these unfamiliar comics while the woman nursed her baby on the bed.
A few months later, I moved to San Fernando, close to my new high school, but each weekend when I returned to the village I saw the neighbour reading his comics on his front step. Sometimes he invited me over, although he never allowed me to read more than a couple of pages. This was quite frustrating, and on my way back I tried to imagine how the stories had ended. In this respect my neighbour was not helpful, as he would say, "Same bat time, same bat channel," as he climbed the steps with his pile of comics.
One of the characters in my new novel, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, is based on this neighbour. In the novel, Sporty is a con man who outsmarts the young narrator with promises of amazing comics. However, if this section of the novel was truly autobiographical, the narrator would have been immensely grateful to the Sporty character for introducing him to these episodic books with their fabulous covers, tantalizing advertisements for X-ray specs and seahorses, and outlandish stories peppered with unrealistic dialogue. The superheroes reminded me of mythological characters from my school's literature textbooks. (Later, I encountered comic book versions of these texts in the Illustrated Classics series.)
For a while, I read every comic book I could lay my hands on. Like other fans, I had my favourite writers, pencillers and inkers. Frequently, there were impassioned arguments in my high school between the DC and Marvel fans.
When I graduated from the school, my interest in comic books gradually waned and, during a Christmas vacation, I packed away the remaining books in our bat-infested attic. (My mother must have been relieved, as she had swept away or burned several now-valuable editions.)
That should have been the end of my comic-book period, but about 10 years or so later, my youngest brother Darin developed his own interest in comics. Together we went through the stacks, and my mother renewed her burning habit. Darin bought his own comic books, and I was surprised by the new styles in pencilling, and by the more adult themes and dialogue. But these were not enough to hold my interest for too long. Soon after, I moved to Canada.
In 1996, I returned to Trinidad for Darin's cremation. During my two weeks on the island, I went through some of his stuff. I saw photographs of Carnival, lecture notes and his uncompleted PhD thesis, and a couple of comic books.
I thought of my brother frequently when I was writing The Amazing Absorbing Boy. I recalled our joking chats about the larger-than-life comic book characters, the exaggerated dialogue, the improbable twists and turns, and the episodic nature of the stories. I tried to infuse some of these into the novel. Close to the novel's completion, I tried to imagine how he would react to the characters. I felt then that he would laugh and say something like, "In cold Toronto, Robin? The molemen would freeze to death." Or maybe he would jokingly repeat my complaint of so many years earlier; he would remind me of all the comic books burned and swept away.