The following article was written by @TheKingofRetro
Today I’m sitting down and writing one of the most personal blogs I could ever write. I decided that it was time for me to sit down and chronicle my entire history with comic books from the time I was a child all the way to today, and everything in between. I’ve wanted to do this for a while now and I’ve been told by multiple people that my best writing often harbors instances of my personal relationship with whatever it is I’m writing about. So today I’m going to tackle the one hobby that I’ve loved and cherished more than any other hobby I’ve ever had (including video games) and that’s comic books.
My history with comic books probably starts out very similar to most of those reading this entry, well….the early part anyway. When I was a kid I remember seeing comics almost everywhere whether it was a drug store, convenience store, supermarket, toy store, and anywhere in between. They were quite simply all over the place in the 80’s. I had a few comics laying around my room when I was really young, mainly Superman or Batman stuff, and I remember an issue of Incredible Hulk that was sitting in my closet but I never really took the time to read them and more or less thought they were just cool things I had that I took for granted. I must have been 4 or 5 at this point and to be honest I have no idea how I ended up with them or what happened to them during those years, but I do know that those few comics didn’t get much use. But I can remember them laying around quite vividly and I thought they were cool looking and glanced at the covers from time to time. It wasn’t for a few more years until I remember moving to another town after my parents got divorced and my grandfather died (I was about 8) and me and my mom moved into his house to fix it up so she could sell it. Down the street there was a comic book store that we would drive by quite often while running errands and one day I asked her if I could go in and look around. When I went into the store there were so many comics that I thought looked cool and after begging my mom for about 10 minutes she decided to let me pick out two and I believe my choices were an issue of Batman & The Outsiders and an issue of The Incredible Hulk, but I may be mistaken on this. Once again a couple of years would lapse until I encountered comics again, I was probably 11 when I discovered that I had a comic book store in my city (I had moved again at this point) and after doing some shopping with my mom I asked to go inside and of course I didn’t leave empty handed. I remember grabbing an issue of Batman as well as a shop preview guide of upcoming comics that was created by the store and cheaply printed in black & white onto standard copy paper. This chain would make these all the way until the early 2000’s and these publications helped me to pick out new comics quite often back in the day.
That upcoming summer my interest in comics was starting to brew but yet I didn’t actually have any due to having lost the issue I picked up a mere 4-5 months before and having probably thrown out the comics I had bought years previous. That summer I was on vacation with my dad and my friend Chris and while visiting the beach one afternoon we entered a small convenience store to grab some snacks and some other necessities and they had a small spinner rack of comics toward the front. One comic grabbed my eye and it was Spider-Man #25 (not ASM #25) so I asked my dad to buy it for me and he did and that comic would mark the first in my collection that I can remember back to the exact title, issue number, and even what the cover looked like. The cover featured Spider-Man floating with a bunch of heads surrounding him with a glow of the Phoenix in the background and it said “Gala 25th issue” on the top right hand corner. It also marked the first comic that I remember having any true meaning to me and I consider it the first comic book that I started my collection with. Oddly enough I didn’t receive any more comics until a few months later where I picked up an issue of Amazing Spider-Man that had a white cover featuring Spider-Man, The Punisher, Moon Knight, Nova, and a few other characters in a story-line called “Round Robin” and it was issue #358 if I remember correctly. I read that issue about a million times over the course of that summer and into the winter where I would eventually stumble into a bunch of comics selling cheap at a flea market that happened to be right down the street from where I lived. One Sunday morning I picked up a stack of about 12 issues of random comics from a vendor at the flea market who had them stuffed into a random box underneath a folding table. He didn’t really deal in comics as he had mainly sports collectibles and some toys but he did have that one box and after looking through it I picked out the ones that looked the most fun to read. The stack I got ended up being a variety of Marvel & DC comics featuring Superman, Superboy, Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Thor and a few others that don’t ring a bell at this time and they were in fairly poor condition but I didn’t care, I just wanted to read them.
Not long after that I was out shopping with my dad and we were at a department store and during our travels down the aisles I came across something called the “Marvel Comics Starter Kit” or something along those lines. It consisted of a small box to keep your comics in, some plastic comic bags, some boards, and about 10 random comics that featured The West Coast Avengers, Silver Surfer, Iron Man, and Captain America. I picked it up and that added to my collection and now I actually had some place to store the comics I had instead of having them sprawled out on my floor. Some time went by and when Christmas came I received a few Superman comics including Superman #75, another issue of Superman that showed him dead on the pavement with newspapers floating around, and a issue of Aladdin that was a movie adaption and had a bright orange cover that I’ll never forget. Then something happened that I can’t explain and I don’t know why but I wouldn’t show much interest in comics in quite some time. I was actively purchasing comic book trading cards during this period and had been previously collecting NBA basketball cards for quite a while and began buying WWF and WCW wrestling cards as well. It seemed like I was going card crazy and even expanded my horizons into baseball and hockey and trading cards were without a doubt my priority for the next couple of years and everything else (aside from video games) took a back seat. But in mid 1994 I started visiting the comic book store again and came across a superhero called The Tick (before the cartoon) and thought he looked really cool and found the page or two I read in the store to be pretty funny so I bought the first issue on a whim. I don’t know what it was but The Tick became like a drug to me during this time and I had to have every issue I could get my hands on, as well as spin-off comics involving other characters from The Ticks universe and just like that I was buying trading cards less and less and my Tick obsession was in full force as I shifted to comics once again. Soon after that spark lit I had pretty much every comic featuring The Tick I could get my paws on so I refocused my desires and went back to buying sports cards and for the next several months comics were an afterthought and basketball cards were my passion once again.
Things finally kicked into full gear and I became a full-time comic book collector in the early months of 1995 when a kid I knew asked me if I wanted to trade my entire trading card collection for his comic book collection. By this time I wasn’t buying much in the way of trading cards and was down to one pack every now and again as opposed to 10+ packs a week. After evaluation his box of comics I knew what I would be getting from him wasn’t anywhere near the value of what he would receive in the trade but I did it anyway, mainly just to unload the ridiculous amount of cards I was drowning in. All I can say is THANK GOD I went through with it because had I not progressed with that trade, or not be presented with the option, than I probably wouldn’t have ever continued on with comics and had fallen into a different kind of hobby or stuck with trading cards. So I’m very thankful for having made that trade even though it was heavily one sided. What I got was a short box full of random comics that included some pretty important issues at the time such as X-Men #25 with the hologram cover, some Amazing Spider-Man issues and annuals, more X-Men issues, some random mini’s, and a few other Marvel based comics. I read them all and added them to my collection and with about $10 in my pocket I went down to the local comic book store and saw they were having a ½ 0ff sale. So naturally I spent all of my money and came home with a bunch of X-Men comics, which was my favorite franchise in comics at that time thanks to the books I got in the trade. X-Men & Uncanny X-Men both became my go to series and before the ½ off sale was done I went back with more cash and built upon my X-Men collection and for the next several month all I bought were X-titles and anything that featured a member of the team on the cover. It didn’t matter what it was, if it had an “X” in the title I was buying it and often used the Wizard price guide to mark off what books I wanted to get on my next trip to the comic shop.
Luckily for me the comic book store near by would run their ½ off sale a few more times throughout the season and I even convinced my friend Kenny to get a few comics that summer. He wasn’t new to comics or anything like that and had a few here and there but he was by no means a collector, but he always enjoyed a trip to the comic book store with me and eventually would seek out some early issues of Spawn around this time by visiting comic stores and flea markets. Around this time I got hooked on a series Chris Claremont did for DC called Sovereign Seven and about a year and a half into that series it skyrocketed to the top of my reading list despite fans not really taking to it and sales being mediocre. When I say I was into Sovereign Seven I mean it, my love for the book still lives on to this day and I have spent countless hours reading those issues and writing into DC proclaiming my love for the title back when it was in its heyday. There was just something about it that I loved that I could never truly explain. Shortly after I fell in love with a book called Hitman, which was also published by DC, and soon after that the X-Men fell out of grace with me and I was beginning to dip my toes into titles that weren’t so much in the limelight for popularity as they were critical acclaim. Also around this time period is when my friend Kenny began collecting comics with a vengeance and was buying titles like Hitman, The Darkness, Witchblade, Sovereign Seven, and others that I can’t think of right now. We talked about comics all the time and visited a ton of comic shops trying to put together sets and hunting down back issues, it was an absolute blast. But things changed and by 1998 DC had cancelled Sovereign Seven and X-Men wasn’t what it once was so the few comics I continued on with were Hitman, a new series based on The Tick, and some of the Cliffhanger titles by Image Comics, mainly Crimson and Battle Chasers. I was really depressed by the cancellation of Sovereign Seven and my heart just wasn’t into comics anymore like it once was and for a short period of time in late 1998 I stopped buying comics all together.
My “retirement” from comic reading and collecting didn’t last very long though and before I knew it I was diving into the “Heroes Return” story-line Marvel had going on after that god-awful “Heroes Reborn” nonsense from the year previous. I was actively reading Captain America, Thor, X-Men (again) and some Spider-Man stuff and almost just as fast as I was getting into these books suddenly I found myself not enjoying them and after the first 5 or 6 issues I felt like I was wasting my money. Soon after I stopped buying the “Heroes Reborn” stuff I had read an article in an issue of Wizard Magazine that Marvel was planning on creating a whole new universe from the beginning featuring their classic characters in a modern world who would be free of continuity and totally accessible, it would be called “Ultimate Marvel”. The line was a few months away from launch but when it did finally hit stands I was first outside of my comic book store to grab Ultimate Spider-Man #1, which I got 2 copies plus a white cover variant, and before I knew it there was a mob outside of the store just waiting to get their hands on this book. I was in love with the Ultimate line of comics from Marvel and continued on with them for the next several years, but soon after I began picking up those books I came across something that would absolutely shape the remainder of my comic book purchasing habits. I came across a brand new company called Crossgen Comics and immediately fell in love with their offerings and was buying Scion, Sigil, and Mystic pretty much from launch. I couldn’t wait for new issues of these books, Scion more than anything, and when I saw that the line was expanding and really trying to plant their flag as a premiere comic book company I was literally doing backflips. It wasn’t long until my Crossgen haul consisted of Scion, Sigil, Mystic, Crux, Sojourn, Brath, Negation, Masters of the Universe, among others, and as time went by I noticed that I was buying very little aside from Crossgen and they eventually became more than just a comic book company to me. They became my passion.
Unfortunately in 2004 Crossgen went out of business due to some poor internal decisions and many creators leaving due to not receiving payment from the publisher and I found myself in the same state of mind I was in when DC cancelled Sovereign Seven about 7 years prior. I was disjointed and didn’t make the effort to find anything to replace the void left by Crossgen and around summertime during 2004 I sold off my entire collection of comics and steered clear of the hobby for a short time. I regretted selling off my comics almost instantly despite getting a large sum for the books and I tried to fill the void by shifting my attention to other hobbies but comics were always calling me in some form or fashion. But despite my collection having been sold off I was far from over with comic books and it was only a matter of time until I was neck deep in the hobby once again.
Well, that’s it for part 1! Stay tuned for the second part of “My History With Comics” which will be published sometime soon after people have a chance to digest this post, which I consider to be very personal and important as it chronicles one of my lifelong passions. Enjoy!
Contact Information
Twitter - @TheKingofRetro
All content within this article is © & ™ by KOR Productions 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment