Growing Backward

I think that I have a genetic propensity toward collecting things–which makes as much sense as everything else that people like to claim happen entirely because of genetics. All my life I have collected ‘stuff,’ be it models and toys, comic books (which runs hot and cold) and currently busts.

Bowen Designs makes some of the best as far as I am concerned, though there are a few other makers out there as well. Collecting them combines two of my favorite passions: My on-again, off-again love affair with comics, and staturary. My latest bust (to be part of a Moving Picture Show slideshow soon) is of Whirlwind (He of the green helmet above. Speaking of which, I have no idea why he wears it. I always assumed that it was because the centrifugal forces generated by his vortex would deprive him of oxygen without some way of protecting himself).

He’s a villain, and one of my earliest exposures to superheroes. He is literally a living whirlwind, his lower half a roiling funnel of air, propelling him forward at terrific speeds.

Perhaps the idea of a man that controls tornadoes is silly, but when you’re nine or ten years old reading about such beings, it makes perfect sense.

And strangely enough, despite growing up, it still makes sense.

Someone said that when you get older, you have to discard childish things. As far as I am concerned, to give up what make the child in you happy is to not get older, but to get old.

Give me Peter Pan any day.