Collecting Comic Books part 1

While I have always liked the superhero/comic book world, I didn’t get into collecting them as soon as you might imagine. Here and there, we would get free comics from school about fire safety with Smokey Bear, or stranger danger with Captain America. I remember getting another one about being able to tell parents about sexual abuse starring Power Pack, as well.

But I mainly stayed in the realm of animated series and such. As mentioned on my first card collecting post, I felt like I would need to read all back issues to fully appreciate the current story, so I never started. I always saw them at Circle K, 7-11, K-Mart, and other places, but never really bothered to even flip through them most of the time. Once I did and saw Superman with a beard talking to people I’d never heard of about things I’d never seen and it just confirmed that it would be too hard to get into.

My friend Brooks was a closet comic fan, and we had a sort of mutual understanding that we could discuss such things only when there was no one else around. He was a fan of Superman and Spider-Man, while I liked the X-Men and Batman. He took me to a small comic shop called Jake’s Comics in the back of a flea market in town that was only open for a few hours on Saturday. It was run by a local guy named Jake Bear, who was also an aspiring artist. Incidentally, there was a sign out front letting customers know about the comic shop in the back that was a really good Wolverine painted on some wood. But because it was his brown/yellow costume and not the yellow/blue one I was familiar with, I didn’t like it as much (though now I think his brown one is the best). Brooks later showed me his collection, and while I thought it was neat, I didn’t feel like getting into the hobby just yet.

The first “real” comics I owned were Christmas gifts from my parents. They found a 4-pack of X-Men related comic books that came in a nice cardboard box, and I believe it was a way of getting rid of some copies of issues that had been over-printed. It turned out that the issues were X-Men #1, Uncanny X-Men #281, X-Factor #71, and Excalibur #42 (all from late 1991). I read them and enjoyed them, but didn’t really understand certain parts of what was going on. Each issue referenced some history and characters that had not been covered in the information from my card collection, so I was kinda in the dark. But it turns out that those particular issues happened to be part of a major shift/re-branding of the entire X-Men family of comics, so they were good jumping on points. If it had included X-Force #1, then I would have had all five issues where the X-teams “reset.” Later on a trip to Utah, my mom got me an issue of X-Men Adventures, a comic book rendition of certain episodes of the animated series. While I appreciated the thought, she happened to pick the one episode that I liked the least - it was kind of a lackluster story and was somehow shown most often on re-runs. But now I had 5 comic books.

Around the Spring of 1995, when the first round of cards had wrapped up and the second set of X-Men cards were out, my friends across the street (who had I had traded cards with) bought a few issues of X-Men and showed me. There was a new Crossover event called the Phalanx Covenant going on that was going to start a 6th X-team: Generation X. He had a paper route that delivered to Circle K, so he had a daily opportunity to see the comics, and the card collecting had gotten him excited to try comics. I started learning about some of the “current events” of the X-Men world, like how Wolverine had gone off on his own after losing the adamantium from his bones. My friend Brooks shared an issue of Wolverine with me and left it at my house. Eventually he told me I could keep it, so now I had 6 issues and I started toying with the idea of buying things monthly.

Soon after something big happened, and something that I didn’t like - they were going to completely change everything and everyone involved with the X-Men. It was announced that the story was going to go in a whole new direction where Professor X hadn’t lived to form the X-Men so the world was a dystopian nightmare with Apocalypse as its architect. It was like everything I had worried about breaking into comics, but ramped up to an 11. I was on the verge of starting to read/buy stuff but I wanted it to be like the animated series version I was familiar with - not this whole new and completely different take. But it ended after only 4 months and everything went back to (relative) normalcy. And here was my opportunity. A really good jumping on point. That’s when I decided to go visit Jake’s Comics again and start giving comics a shot.

I started going there weekly, and it became a bit of a ritual that I would wake up on Saturday morning, eat breakfast, watch the X-Men animated series and whatever was after it, then head on down to the back of the flea market to get the latest comics. Often, I was there before Jake (the owner/proprietor) got there, and soon became one of his most reliable customers. Over the next few weeks I started to learn a lot about how the comics industry works - things like the release schedules for each title, and what limited series and one-shots are. It turned out that Jake didn’t really have an account with the big comics distributors; he happened to be friends with the owners of a comic store in Boise called 1,000,000 Comix and they let him purchase things at the same price that they did. He would make a weekly trip over there to pick up the week’s order and hang out with them for a few hours.

After getting 2 or 3 months of issues, I started to feel comfortable enough to branch out a bit. I told Jake to get me one of anything that has anything to do with the X-Men in it - be it a mini-series, one-shot, or guest appearance. I knew that the Marvel Universe was pretty interconnected, so sometimes events in Thor spill over to the X-Men in the form of weather, or a newspaper strike from Spider-Man shows up in the Fantastic Four. I guess you could say that I had a big case of FOMO - fear of missing out - and I didn’t want to be caught unaware when crossover events (however small they may be) happened. Even though I learned that I probably could have just stuck with the main series and been ok, I still wanted everything just in case the Gambit/Spider-Man/Howard the Duck Team-up One-shot had lasting implications (it didn’t happen often, but you never know).

Occasionally I would take a brother or two with me; Mitch and Brady were the usual candidates. When they came I would buy them a $1 issue of something called Professor X and the X-Men, which were re-tellings of the original Stan Lee run of X-Men from the 60’s, but with smaller words and newer, more modern art that was aimed at younger readers. 

I soon started learning to recognize different artists’ styles, and about how often they have to have guest artists sub in. Certain pencillers were very consistent and only rarely missed an issue, while others couldn’t seem to string more than 2 issues together at a time before tagging out. Another thing I caught onto was how the release scheduling worked; on a given Friday night I knew in advance which monthly issues I would be able to buy the next morning, so I took the time to re-read the last issues of those titles so that I would have a refreshed memory on Saturday.

I also started buying Wizard Magazine monthly. I had flipped through them here and there at the card shop and other places, and was turned off by how negative they seemed to be towards Marvel in general and the X-Men in particular. But I soon learned to take it in stride and grew accustomed to their brand of humor. After a while, I learned that their criticism most likely came from a place of love - they wanted the X-books to be better and poked fun at them as a form of public shaming to try and get Marvel to get back on track. My mom somehow heard through her false rumor grapevine that this magazine (Wizard) was teaching kids black magic. I argued with her for a little bit and finally had to resort to grabbing a copy and showing her, “Look - it’s Batman and Spider-Man. Comic books - nothing to do with magic or Satan worshiping whatsoever.” I fully believe that she would have been on the “D’n’D is of the devil,” train if I played such games.

So after having read and re-read those first four issues I got for Christmas multiple times, I finally decided to find out the resolution to those cliff-hangers. I learned that those gift issues were pretty good jumping on points, so I decided to try and complete the collection starting with October 1991. Over time, I bought issues here and there from Jake’s and other places, but the biggest score was finding a stash being sold for pennies per issue at a bookstore in Boise. I had gone over there with my mom, who was running some errands, and she dropped my brothers and me off at Q-Zar, a laser tag place. We played a few games of laser tag, some arcade games, and had a slice of pizza like usual. But I wandered over to the bookstore a couple doors down and found that someone had decided to sell their kids’ abandoned collection. I ended up going home with more than 50 back issues for like $15. Then I made lists of what I had and was missing and started to try and fill in the gaps from various stores (mainly Jake’s).

Once I had a decent collection going, I had to make a choice of what I wanted to spend my time/money on. The Nintendo 64 was going to be released within the next year or so, and card collecting had been fun but the benefit of learning new stuff was starting to see diminishing returns, so I stopped doing cards after the 1996 Fleer X-Men Kubert set and focused most of my monthly money on comics. Instead of buying pages, binders, and plastic cases, I started buying sleeves and cardboard backers to keep them in good condition. Acid-free paper and other things were popular at the time because apparently a lot of older things turn yellow over time because of a certain acid used in the manufacturing process. So stores were selling acid-free options (for a higher price) which were marketed as a preservation tactic. I cheaped out and bought the regular stuff, but I haven’t noticed anything detrimental yet. I used some old boxes from canned food purchases my family was going to throw out and turned them into makeshift longboxes that were laid out in my room. Unfortunately I had a slight mishap one day. I spilled some hot chocolate and it got onto some issues of X-Factor. They were in sleeves so most of the damage was just on the tops of the pages, thankfully, but I tried to clean and dry them as much as possible.

As part of the effort to get everything starting from that 1991 starting point, I had to go through and find all of the Age of Apocalypse stuff that I purposely skipped. Now that I knew it was just an extended “elseworlds/what if” type of thing (even though it had consequences that permeated back into the ‘regular’ world) I was okay with it and wanted to read it. But because it was such a popular crossover, it was hard to find certain issues. The next big crossover was called Onslaught, and it involved most of the Marvel Universe. In an effort to get everything, I ended up buying random issues of things like Hulk, Spider-Man, Green Goblin, and Fantastic Four. Here and there I would buy something else non X-related. When Spider-Man relaunched, I bought the first 5 issues of the new book, as well as a few independent things just because I liked the artwork.

Collecting Comic Books part 2