Best. Wife. EVER.

I've been lucky.

All my former gal pals (haven't actually been that many) have either put up with or even encouraged my comics habit. One was even into them a little. But I really hit the jackpot with my wife, Suzanne. I don't think she'd ever even picked up a comic in her life before we met but, as with almost all my interests, she decided to make the effort to find out what I saw in them. She started reading a couple comics from my stack when I brought them home from the shop each week. (That stack has gotten considerably smaller these days.) She instantly took a liking to Jeff Smith's BONE and Terry Moore's STRANGERS IN PARADISE. She got a naughty kick out of OMAHA THE CAT DANCER and believed me when I said I just bought it for the art. She tried to read a few of my brother's books but superheroes weren't her thing. She did like TELLOS, though.

Eventually, she started going to the shop (Nostalgia Plus in Richmond) with me and befriended the owners. It's gotten to the point that, if I show up without her, they're disappointed. Soon, she was buying her own titles. Though, as I said, she wasn't into superheroes, she did start buying WONDER WOMAN and, briefly, bought AVENGELINE and GLORY. (Ugh!) When I started buying PREACHER, about six issues into the run, she fell in love with it and claimed the series for her own. She even allowed me to pay waaaay too much for the back issues at a convention so she could have a complete set.

Best of all, she started going to the HEROES CONVENTION in Charlotte with me every year. It became something we both looked forward to doing together. We even had our own restaurant. It was a ritual. Until they closed down last year, the Bistro 100 was our place. It was at HEROES a couple years ago that she met and fell in like with the Luna Brothers and started reading their book GIRLS and bought the trade of ULTRA.

I got a little worried last week when she announced that she wasn't interested in seeing SPIDER-MAN 3 with me in the theater. To be honest, I wasn't too keen on it either. But I didn't want to watch it on DVD and find myself wishing I'd seen it on the "big screen." (That happens often.) But she wasn't having any. She's been horribly busy at work and her comics reading had fallen to the wayside. I started to think that I was on my own again.

Then, this week, she got off work in time to go with me to get my weekly fix. Her eyes fell immediately on two books prominently featuring heroic-looking females on the covers: IRON MAN: HIGH VELOCITY and HEROES FOR HIRE. I wanted to tell her that those books were probably not written with ladies in mind and would probably disappoint her. All the boobs-in-your-face shots were a dead giveaway. (Plus, I have to wonder what she's going to think of the cover to the upcoming HEROES FOR HIRE #13, pictured above.) But she was showing interest in comics again, so I kept my opinion to myself. As I perused the new-releases, she wandered over to the back issue section. I was congratulating myself for keeping my spending down when she wandered up with a three-inch stack of books. Every back issue she could find. My eyes widened. It was quite a chunk of change, at $2.99 an issue. But I didn't really mind. We can (sort of) afford it. And my baby was back!

Now if I can just get her to start watching horror movies...