Collecting Comic Books part 2

Collecting Comic Books Part 1

Eventually I was buying 10 monthly titles: Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, Generation X, X-Man, Cable, Wolverine, and Deadpool. These plus the mini-series, quarterly series (X-Men Unlimited, etc.), annuals, and other random issues I bought meant I was spending upwards of $50 per month on comics, and sometimes more. One time I realized that we were going to be out of town on a Saturday and hadn’t been able to give Jake notice to hold some stuff for me. I knew where he worked during the week so I paid a quick visit to him to let him know. Later he told me that I shouldn’t have bothered him at work, and it was doubly embarrassing for me because I knew the girl who worked the counter from school. 

Here and there I got the opportunity to visit a few different shops. When visiting family in Utah I tried to visit comic/card shops when I could, and besides visiting 1,000,000 Comix a few times, once my dad took me to a shop near my old house in Boise during a visit to my grandma. 

Things continued much this same way for quite a while until Jake decided to move on with his life and close the shop. What I had to do instead was make arrangements with 1,000,000 Comix to set aside a copy of everything I wanted and then send them a money order every 6 weeks or so and they would ship me what I wanted. It wasn’t nearly as fun as getting a few issues every week, but it sufficed. However, I, too, was about to embark on a new stage in life and needed to find a decent cut-off point. Marvel did a company-wide event in May of 1997 where every monthly title was numbered -1, and it was a throwback to some past event. That seemed good to me so I stopped there. As it turned out, I was slated to help my aunt/uncle run their fireworks business that summer after I graduated high school. My mom and I mostly sat in the booth with not a whole lot to do (this would have been a perfect time to have a 3DS and a few Zelda games, but since those weren’t invented, a Game Boy). Out of sheer coincidence, the parking lot we were assigned to happened to be across the street from 1,000,000 Comix, so I was able to get my last shipment of comics in person and tell them that I won’t be needing their services anymore. I bought everything up to and including those -1 issues, and from that point forward the only thing I bought was Wizard Magazine. All together, I had seriously collected comics for a little over two years, roughly about the same amount of time that I had spent collecting cards, with about a 6 month overlap. 

During my first year of college, I left most of my things at home as I didn’t see the point of moving all my junk to a dorm 5 hours away to just go and move it back 8 months later. I did, however, take my stack of Wizard magazines as reading material. And I also made a trip to the local supermarket where I was able to keep purchasing the magazine when it came out. But after that year, I went to Japan for a couple of years so I wasn’t able to do anything comics related. When I returned to the States, I ended up buying a couple of issues of Wizard, and then one more after I was married, but it wasn’t quite the same. And since that day my collecting days have been over. I still have them, but they just sit in a plastic tote in my shed. I wonder if the acid from the paper has turned some of them yellow yet . . .

However, just because I didn’t buy physical copies didn’t mean I stopped collecting. I discovered that there were electronic versions of most major comics that people had scanned and put into zip files. Using file-sharing programs like eMule and some others, I spent weeks downloading large volumes of comics and sorting them. My goal was to a) get all of them, and b) separate them into “eras” that seem to make sense. So for example, the first era was from the beginning of publication until it was cancelled. The second started when the “new” X-Men (like Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Storm) were added to the team, and ended when the first spin-off books were made (New Mutants and X-Factor). Another one was the 1991 reboot of all the teams up through the Age of Apocalypse crossover event.

In addition to all of the monthly titles which were easy to find, I also tried getting all of the one-shots and mini-series starring my favorite mutants, which was a lot harder because they aren’t as popular as the main series. I worked on putting a chronological publication list together, and then got more ambitions and started working on a correct reading order list, but that would take forever and be super confusing, so I gave up after a few hours. After doing all of that work, I had the project like 97% done, with the remaining 3% being finding random issues of things like Marvel Comics Presents or some obscure mini-series. I started to read through them and got up until around the Inferno crossover (circa ~1986) and then kinda stopped. So I can say that I’ve read everything from 1963 to 1997 except for a gap of 5 years between 1986 and 1991.

Part of me wants to go back and pick up reading the digital versions again, but then I think of the futility of it all. It’s not like the story actually stops at 1997, and a lot of things have changed in ways that I don’t agree with since then. In a way, I sorta like keeping things how they are; it’s like things just kinda paused and have been the same ever since. To me, comic books are like the male equivalent of a soap opera for girls. They both have a serialized nature with characters, but one focuses on drama, love, and betrayal, while the other focuses on action/fighting, super powers, and good vs. evil. But both just keep going (for the most part). It’s not something like the Harry Potter series where JK Rowling knew there were only going to be 7 books all written by the same author, or something like Back to the Future where there are 3 movies made by the same creative team and no more will be made. These comics keep getting published monthly, and all the while writers and artists swap out every so often so tone, quality, and pacing vary wildly from year to year. But I also suspect that because of waning interest, publishers have resorted to gimmicky tactics in an effort to attract readers, and such things turn me off from wanting to resume the hobby.

So it’s not like reading Tolkien’s works. In that world, Tolkien endeavored to make it seem like Middle-Earth was a real world, and that these tales came to us because he translated the stories from the Red Book of Westmarch (the one that Bilbo started, Frodo added on to, and Samwise finished). Unfortunately, the dedication of the writers/artists/publishers to keep up such standards depends on the year and the particular combination of the staff. When Chris Claremont was writing all the X-books (1975-1991), it felt more like Tolkien in that he (Claremont) had a grand story to tell in many parts though several teams, and that the stories of the various books wove together to make a tapestry. But once he was gone it seemed like every book had its own direction and so the illusion was ruined.


Looking back, there are a few trends that I don’t particularly care for in the world of comics. I didn’t like them when I was collecting, and from what I hear, they’ve only increased in frequency over the years. The first is cancelling and then relaunching a title with a new issue #1. Corporate bean counters noticed that a lot more people are willing to give a first issue a try so if they relaunch then that individual issue sells better (this can probably be explained by investment collectors buying #1s because they tend to be worth more and that issue #1 is attractive to new readers because they know they’re not missing out on crucial character history). After the Bryan Singer X-Men movies were popular, Marvel relaunched/rebranded the X-titles with a restarted numbering (and with new costumes that resembled the movie), and then after a few years continued the numbering where they had left off (with more traditional costumes). And while high numbering initially turned me off when I was younger, I took a sense of pride in reading something that had lasted over 300 issues. In the case of Action Comics, I loved seeing it hit issue #1000 as a testament to the longevity of the character of Superman.

Another trend is major retconning. Spider-Man did it in the 90’s with the whole clone story and everyone hated it, so they had to retcon the retcon. While I don’t mind that after 30 years of the character being around someone at Marvel finally decided to tackle the actual origins of Wolverine, it retconned a bunch of things like that the X in ‘Weapon X’ was actually a Roman numeral and our long-time understanding of how certain powers work was changed.

I also really, really hate title/mantle-swapping. To me, the character is the person and not their mantle/title/job. Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and if he retires while someone else gets similar powers, they need a different title. Spider-Boy, Arachnid-Man, the Tarantula - anything but Spider-Man. I didn’t like when Azrael was (temporarily) Batman - he should have been named something else. Unfortunately, it seems like almost every major character has been replaced with a race and or gender swapped character who took the original character’s name. This feels like a social-justice inspired change to try and appeal to the blue-checkmarks on Twitter, but ends up pissing off long time fans. In the case of Thor, ‘Thor’ isn’t a title - it’s his actual name, but somehow it got transferred to Jane Foster. When I replace Bob in accounting at work, I don’t change my name to Bob, but I guess this is how it works in modern Marvel. Granted, there are a few characters where title swapping is appropriate, like Green Lantern, but those are less common.

Overall, it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to participate in the hobby. I'm not sure if my collection is really worth anything. The recent slew of superhero movies may have made them go up in value, but bad movies might have had an adverse effect. I guess I am not sure where I would find the demand for such things to sell them even if I were so inclined. While they're not really doing much other than collecting dust, I do sort of enjoy the feeling of knowing that I at least have them.

If I suddenly had lots of money and a ton of extra time, it'd be fun to take it up again, but I don't think the publishers are making them in a manner that I would appreciate at the moment.