I was home sick from elementary school, and my dad came back with a stack of those sealed Whitman 3-packs from Sears. One of them was Amazing Spider-Man #194, the first appearance of the Black Cat. I still have that beat-up copy. That was it. Spider-Man fan for life.
After that, my mom would hand me a few bucks on bingo nights to pick out comics at the 7-11 before we headed over. The best part wasn't really the comics. It was being out on a school night, up way past bedtime, with a stack of new adventures in my lap. I still have every one of those books, including the ones that somehow lost their covers along the way. (Side question: anyone know what a poor-condition Hot Stuff the Little Devil goes for these days?)
A few years later I found Chris Claremont's X-Men and Hal Jordan's Green Lantern, and for whatever reason I could never buy them in order. I'd write up a list of missing issues and slip it to my dad before his business trips. Sometimes he'd duck into a used bookstore in whatever city he was in, and when he came home late Friday night it felt like Christmas. I still have the original brown bags with the little price tags cut from notebook paper. VF $1.00, GD $0.50. I didn't care what grade they were. I just wanted to read them.
One year I talked my grandparents into buying me subscriptions off those mail-order cards Marvel used to stick in the books: Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular, Fantastic Four, The Thing. Running to the mailbox to see if the brown-wrapped comics had come was its own kind of holiday. The Postal Service did unspeakable things to them. Folded them, bent them, occasionally ran them through what looked like a shredder. I kept every one anyway.
Then I quit. Right before McFarlane's Amazing Spider-Man #300. Still regret it. The Image launch a few years later pulled me back in for a minute, but that didn't hold either, and I drifted away from the monthly stack.
I never really stopped being a fan, though. Just a reader. The MCU eventually dragged me back into the stories, and in the meantime DC kept me fed with Justice League and Batman Beyond. I'd rent whatever animated movie came out. Every so often I'd hear about some great storyline and go hunt down a write-up of it online.
I bought this domain years ago with a half-formed idea about writing on comic collecting and investing. Then it sat. You might still trip over a few of those old pages. I'm working through them. What finally got me moving was a different angle: flip newer hot books, bank the money, use it to chase down the back issues I always wanted. I love my beat-up ASM #194, but I'd love a 9.6 even better, a 9.8. I've genuinely thought about buying a nearly-disintegrating copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 just to say I own one. Tell me that wouldn't be awesome.
So that's where I am. I couldn't list every way Wolverine has cheated death, but I spent a lot of hours with him growing up and a lot more recently watching animated reruns with my daughter. I may own a shirt or two with his face on it. Writing about this stuff makes me happy, and I like the idea of chasing a couple of grails I always figured I'd never own. I'll keep posting as I go. The flips that work, the ones that blow up in my face, and whatever I pick up along the way.
Hope you stick around.
Atomm