MY GRANDPA TORE THE COVERS OFF AND HANDED ME RIVERDALE

I learned to read on stolen property. Not, like, real crime. Beautiful crime. My grandpa ran a store, and back then if a comic or a magazine didn’t sell, you didn’t ship the whole thing back to the distributor. You tore the cover clean off, sent the cover back for credit, and the coverless guts were supposed to get pulped. Destroyed. Erased from the official record. Except my grandpa didn’t pulp them. He handed them to me. So I grew up with these armloads of coverless Archie digests, the front torn away to reveal the raw newsprint underneath, and every single one had that little warning buried in the indicia: if you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware it was reported as “unsold and destroyed." I was, functionally, reading a stack of comics that the publisher believed had been incinerated. Riverdale was a ghost town that only existed in my grandpa’s store and my hands. I felt like I was getting away with something. I kind of was. Then, years later, an aunt unloaded…