When I think of my childhood, I think of all the trappings of the late 1980s and early ’90s—beatable video games, quick-melting Popsicles, dares and double-dares and double-dog-dares. But what was just as present as all these were the color-splashed covers of comic books, the thin periodicals trapped between plastic and cardboard, lined up in a box in my older brother’s room. A superhero Rolodex. He treated them like my mother treated her record collection. Sacred. Special. Celebrated like trophies, revered like jewels. Like ancient artifacts to be peered at and preserved.

Truthfully, I never had my own. And because of that—because they were always at a distance—I thought of them as something to be careful with. Something off-limits to me. My brother,…