Yet Another Comics Site

_____This site has always been as much about my relationship with comics as it has been about comics themselves, though the amount that this shows varies from article to article. For those of you who get bored by the personal stuff, I recommend finding another article to read.
_____Today is February 26th, 2000. It has been for a little under an hour. It is my twentieth birthday. And as such, it is also the tenth anniversary of my entry into the hobby of collecting comics.
_____On my tenth birthday, I received a gift certificate to a comic book store. This resulted in a somewhat calculated introduction to comics. I had the gift certificate, so I had to figure out what I wanted to spend it on. From my vague general knowledge of comics, I settled on Batman and Aquaman as two promising candidates. The first comic I ever bought was Best of the Brave and the Bold Number Five, featuring both. After reading it, I basically dropped Aquaman like a hot potato and went into collecting Batman.
_____That first four months of collecting comics was odd in several respects as far as my collecting is concerned. I bought only one hero's comics, I bought new comics and full price back issues, and in that whole four months I spent only 2 gift certificates (a second one followed, for some reason I've forgotten). Even accounting for cheaper prices back then, I wasn't buying a lot.
_____The next school year brought me the wonders of beaten up old comics in musty boxes at the back of used bookstores. Here is where I discovered almost all of my favorite series. The Titans, the Outsiders, the All-Star Squadron. My personal Golden Age.

_____The year after that saw a return to my buying habits of the first year, filling my collection with new material, although now covering a much wider range. After that, back to the bargain bins for a year.
_____My fifth school year of collecting comics was the year when I "subscribed" to comics. Every week, without fail, I picked up the new issue of Marvel 2099's line. While I of course didn't think of it in these terms at the time, I was experiencing another facet of collecting. While much more expensive, I quite enjoyed the feeling of routine and the excitement that came from actually following a hero in "real time", eagerly awaiting each new issue.

_____The next year I made a fascinating discovery. Comics stores advertised sales in the newspaper. This opened up a whole new world for me. Combining the affordability of bargain bins with newer stock, I collected more than ever before.
_____The two years that followed somehow saw my collection double in size. I was buying at a tremendous rate, in retrospect. This was also the period where I began to buy comics faster than I could read them, resulting in a perpetual list of comics to be read.
_____Since then I've been more discriminating. While I've by no means stopped purchasing, I've been more selective.
_____That's a rough chronology of my collecting over the ten years I've been in this hobby. Comics have been with me through good years and bad years, both at home and at school. I've been collecting longer than I've known any of my friends. I've spent more on them than any other item I can think of. While travelling, I try to find comic book stores in strange cities. They are the one subject on which I consider myself not merely learned but a genuine expert. Not the foremost expert, of course, but an expert nonetheless.
_____While comics are not my whole life, they are undeniably a part of it. A large part, and one that has brought me much joy.
_____Some random memories of comics...
_____I bought my first comic book storage box, a short one, the day after Christmas of 1993. It was for my 2099 books. I now have over a dozen short and another dozen long ones.
_____The most money I ever paid for a comic was for New Teen Titans (first series) #1. I paid 7$. Later that day I saw if for 5$, which taught me the valuable lesson that no matter what the comic is, you can always find it cheaper. For many years it was my most valuable comic. Now, a Demon annual I paid 33 cents for is, due to the debut of Hitman. For some illogical reason, I am mildly annoyed that such a random purchase has outstripped a far more symbolically satisfying one.
_____In the summer of 1995, I went to Europe on vacation. I brough only a few issues of Batman and the Outsiders and my Batman: A Death in the Family TPB. I re-read them many times. A month later, a store in Winnipeg, Manitoba, would have an entire room full of quarter comics, prompting my largest ever single day haul, nearly a hundred comics. I suppose that summer marked the true end of my "Golden Age" childhood in comics.
_____I own an issue of Spider-Man with a signature of Todd MacFarlane on it. I have no clue if the signature is genuine. I paid 50 cents for it. This is the only signed comic I own.
_____The first series I ever decided to collect completely before reading was Atlantis Attacks in the summer of 1994. It took me two and a half years to amass all fourteen parts. Meanwhile, waiting to complete a series before reading it became an increasingly large part of my collecting style, a fact that was symbiotically linked with my purchasing faster than I could read anyway.
_____The last new comic I bought new at full price was DC Versus Marvel #1. I regretted it after reading it. It's actually worth cover price, now.
_____In 1999 I realized, while reading a run of Legion of Super-Heroes (v.2), that the letterer had changed, without consulting the credits. Not only that, I identified the departed letterer by name (Ben Oda). I don't think anything has ever convinced me so profoundly that I knew way too much about comics.
_____I can't remember when I first realized my collection was better than most comic book stores' stock, in terms of what I'd rather own. I do remember that it was in 1998 that I realized my collection was larger than some comic book stores.
_____In december of 1999 I started work on this comic book website, and on January 4th, 2000, it went on-line.
_____In the decade that led up to this web-site's launch, I saw the DC Multi-verse reform into a universe. I saw Tara "Terra" Markov die. I saw Phil Sheldon lose an eye as a hundred foot wave crashed over New York. I saw Adrian Veidt reveal he wasn't a Republic serial villain. I saw Superman shake hands with Spider-man. I saw Galactus' first attempt to consume the Earth turned back. I saw Donna Troy find out who she really was (several times, actually). I saw Gwen Stacey die, and Superman. I saw Wolfman, Lee, Kirby, Ditko, Perez, Busiek, Moore, Barr, Davis, Moy, Giffen, Levitz, Thomas, Kesel, Byrne, Claremont, Romita, Kane, Broome, Infantino, Fox, Morrison, Ostrander, Cambell, Peyer, McCraw, Grummett, Wood, Waid, and hundreds more make magic.
_____And maybe, just for a moment, I believed a man could fly.
_____And, in the end, that's the preamble. The rest of this web-site... that's the breakdown.