Continuing with my twelve posting days of Holiday Cheer. Yesterday I gave some love to Joshua Hale Fialkov. Today we go to the man who saved me from becoming the person that never makes it into comics.

I first started reading comics when I was around four or five years old. G.I. Joe, Captain Carrot, the occasional Spider-Man or Super-Man comic thrown in. It was a casual sort of reading until I hit my teens and my friend showed me his copies of Infinity Gauntlet. I started reading Marvel comics exclusively, eventually getting Image books and picking up Valiant and DC books that Wizard told me I should buy. Then I bought The Maxx, illustrated and written by Sam Kieth, and realized that everything else I was reading was complete crap. I had nowhere to turn to. Al Gore didn’t install the internet into my parents’ place yet and none of my friends were into comics. So I stopped reading comics but through the years I’ve always kept up with Sam Kieth. And even though I only started reading comics again recently, which explains why I’m checking out books like Sandman, Transmet and Hellblazer for the first time amongst other gems I missed (like the book I’ll be talking about on Monday), I read Zero Girl and Legs and Four Women and Ojo during my self-imposed comic book exile (although Ojo was technically when I was back into comics).

This holiday season I want to send some well-wishes over to Sam Kieth and in the New Year I hope comics can offer him something to make it worth coming back to us. He pops in time and again but I’m hungry for another knock-me-on-my-ass story that I feel only he can deliver. If it wasn’t for you producing The Maxx I’d likely be on Newsarama right now, complaining about how much I despise “The Other” and calling Dan Didio a goat-fucker.

For the record, I think Mr. Didio is a bit of a genius and I’m not reading The Other despite my passing interest in Peter David’s work and my inability to give up on JMS.

Happy Holidays Mr. Kieth, your artistic vision and storytelling mastery makes the rest of us look like amateur hour.

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I lived on Woodhull Street, between Hicks and Columbia. My parents moved into the apartment when they first got married, had me two years later, and four years later bought the house along with our downstairs neighbor, Jumbi, and our upstairs neighbors, John and Fran. The neighborhood didn’t have much, a store around the corner that was originally owned by Italians, and then switched to Arabs. We had the power house down the block with a softball field made of ripped-up concrete and paint chips.

You go down to President Street and you had Joe Tomo’s cigar shop, Frank’s department store, House of Pizza and Calzone and Pegasus Video. We used to steal from Joe all the time, Frank’s was were my mom used to get me my Underoos, Pegasus Video was my first place of employment and the House of Pizza and Calzones had the best fried calzones you’ll ever eat – they had ham in them everyday except Friday, a good Christian place.

You can walk across the bridge, across the BQE and enter Carroll Gardens. During heavy snow we would ride our sleds down the bridge. The people who lived in the house next to the bridge used to grow vegetables in their yard – they had this creepy ass scarecrow and a dog that would bark at us whenever we walked by.

Court Street was filled with mom and pop stores – pizza shops and pharmacies. The first video store in the neighborhood, Speedos, opened there in the early 80s. It was run by these two long-haired rocker looking dudes. I saw a poster for C.H.U.D. there once and begged my father to rent it for me – he refused, we got Ghoulies instead. Every year Court Street would close down for the weekend and the Court Street Feast would roll into town. Rides, games, live music and food – it was a three day carnival right in the middle of the busiest street in our neighborhood. It was where we all took our dates on a Saturday night in Junior High School – holding hands as we walked down the block and kissing behind the water-gun game.

Carroll Park is where we would go when we cut lunch. Playing basketball or tag, watching the old men play bocce ball and trying to figure out what the fucking rules were. Riding the rusted swing and occasionally braving the stench of the bathroom from hell.

You’d walk down Court Street, get to Atlantic Avenue. Every year they had the Atlantic Antic which was the festival we all made fun of. No rides. No games. Just people selling their crappy home-made crafts and some people selling food – it was the old people’s festival.

From there you go into Brooklyn Heights. My mom used to walk me down that way every weekend over the summer – they had this park that was made entirely of wood and plastic – a ride that looked exactly like a pirate ship to a kid, a humongous jungle gym I used to pretend was a space ship and tire swings that every kid would fight over. There was a Baskin Robbins up the street where I’d get my weekly mint-chip cone and a Blimpies next door where I’d get the occasional ham sandwich. This building had this huge anchor in front of it, still does, everyone I know who grew up in that neighborhood has tried to lift that anchor at least once as a kid.

The movie theater in the heights was ridiculously small. Two tiny screens that I remember and a vending machine. I saw Jurassic Park there and felt gypped.

Montague Street in the Heights became the first date destination in High School. La Traviata followed by a walk along the Promenade, finding a bench to sit on, talk, and eventually work up the nerve to put my arm around the girl. You can walk over the Brooklyn Bridge from there, or at least go part way, and try to sneak in your first kiss while the wind whipped over the Hudson and blew her hair into your face.

Going up towards Park Slope you’d hit the Grand Army Plaza Library. It’s this huge library we used to go to when we had a paper due, as if our Local Library didn’t have all the information we needed on Thomas Jefferson. We’d get lost in the large rooms, ask the librarian where a book was and get a lecture on the Dewey Decimal System. I thought I’d never see a library bigger than that place but now I make routine visits to the Library of Congress. Going back to Grand Army Plaza now is like going back to your elementary school and wondering how you fit in the chairs.

The library was right near Prospect Park, where many a birthday party was held. The family would get together and barbeque, we’d bring a piñata, our bikes, and trays filled with Spanish food. String decorations from the tree – it was the closest we got at that time to having a big yard to play in.

Keep going north and you get to Melody Lanes – we used to go bowling there every Saturday, I was actually on a league. I had my own ball with my name on it and my team was called “The Strikers”. I liked bowling so much I had a bowling birthday party – it ended up with us all putting the dorky shoes away and playing DJ Boy and Operation Wolf in the arcade area while putting down hamburgers. There was a White Castle right near the bowling alley – when I’d get home late at night in High School and if my mom was still up we’d drive out there and bring home a sack of burgers. We fought a lot back then but White Castles was always our special time.

Nelly Bly was an amusement park out by the Toys R’ Us in Sheepshead Bay. My parents would always take me there all the time over the summer. I don’t remember the rides, much, I remember this one time that I went down the potato sack slide with my dad – we raced down. Everything else is sort of blur. Down by the bay we’d watch people fly kites on a Sunday – I was never good at kites and seeing the kites these people were capable of getting in the air was astonishing.

Coney Island is the home of the first Nathan’s Hot-Dog and the famous cyclone roller coaster. Every Easter my grandparents would take all the grandchildren down to Coney Island and give us each twenty ride tickets for Astroland Park. We’d ride the log flume and the bumper cars and this roller coaster that looked like a worm and went through an apple. When we got older we’d just ride the cyclone as many times as we can with our allotment of money – the front car felt like it left the track, the back car gave you whiplash, we’d swap back and forth to get the full experience. Part of the fun of the cyclone is the fear that it’s going to fall apart one day and kill everyone on it.

I’m kind of nostalgic today. My parents are officially moving out of the house I grew up in this weekend. I’m never going to see it again. The buyers are gutting it and turning it into condos. I feel like every time I go home it all changes some more. Coney Island has a ball park. Pegasus Video is closing. The Power House has a repaved and repainted field. The Atlantic Antic is the new cool. Brooklyn Heights’ theater has a concession stand. Carroll Park and the Heights Park were torn down and replaced with padded, kid-friendly monstrosities. The House of Pizza and Calzone puts ham in their fried calzones on Fridays.

I know change is good but it just seems like every time I go home Brooklyn is a different place. My old neighborhood is posh. There’re all these people that moved there recently from the Midwest or the West Coast or New England. I talk to my friends and they all say it’s kind of sad, that whereas it’s nice that everything’s hip and there’re tons of things to do they all sort of feel like it lost something it had in the 80s and early 90s. People aren’t as friendly any more – the sense of neighborhood seems to have gotten sucked out. There aren’t as many block parties. They don’t know all of their neighbors’ names. There are yellow cabs going down Henry Street, zipping people over the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan – nobody takes the walk anymore. The Johnny pumps are never opened and when they are someone calls the fire department.

And now the house is gone. I’ve been living elsewhere for almost ten years; I go home whenever I can but when I do I see things change in chunks. To everyone else it may seem gradual but it feels like every time I return home there’s an old business closed or a friend’s old house being converted to condos.

This week was titled “Definitive Brooklyn” but when I look at it now, I realize everything I thought was definitive has changed.