Who here is old enough to remember lazer tag?

I was obsessed with baseball cards as a kid. We had a hallway closet in our house upstairs. Mostly winter coats and hunting stuff. I made the bottom of this little closet my domain. My own little wardrobe to Narnia. Only the little door in the back of the closet went to the hottest attic known to mankind. Not a snow covered lamp post.

There were little stations for my cards. Set up like the local card/hobby shop.

And one little station for my comic books. But I did have a few.

That's the thing I remember about those old hobby shops of the late 80s and early 90s. They carried baseball cards and comic books...

I was never a big comic book fan, but there was one I picked up from time to time and remember enjoying.

Groo the Wanderer

I have this one little storage bin in the attic that says John's Keepsakes. And buried underneath a mountain of Upper Deck cards and Beckett magazines is a little stack of Groo the Wanderer issues.

Recently, I got to thinking about ol' Groo for some reason and decided to dig him out.

There he was. Staring up at me. Silly as ever.

I pick up an issue and begin paging through it.

And I am struck by something I have no recollection of.

This issue was 36 pages counting the covers. Thirteen of them were ads.

I remembered ads. I'd forgotten it was that many.

M&Ms. Lazer Tag. Cap'n Crunch Spider-Man Cereal. I never thought twice about them back then. They were just part of the comic. Part of the fun, honestly.

I can't read it that way anymore. Now I see the machinery. The thirteen pages doing a job, the two-page spread right where your attention peaks, the whole thing built to sell as much as to entertain.

I don't even mind it. I make my living a little closer to those thirteen pages than I'd have guessed as a kid. There's an art to it.

But something's gone too. The kid who could just read Groo and never wonder what it was for. You only get to be him once, before you start seeing how everything is built.

I still love Groo. I just can't unsee the other thirteen pages.

Best,

John Montgomery