[As you might recall, around 2013-2014, the CSBG posts on the Wayback Machine often got wonky, format-wise, and that’s the case with this column, which Greg posted on 8 November 2013. The comments are still there, if you want to check them out, but it’s just harder to read that the usual format. Anyway, Greg takes us a nice trip through his journey to reconstruct his collection, so enjoy!]
This is one of those weird little fan milestones that I not only never expected to actually reach, but I honestly thought it was impossible.
A little background first.
My personal Golden Age of comics, that period from when I first fell in love with them to when I finally left them behind me (when I was young and foolish enough to think I could, y’know, DO that) was from Feburary 1968, when I picked up my first DC 80-page Giant — Flash #178 — to when I gave up trying to follow the X-Men, which was the last Marvel book I was even trying to keep up with. That was around, oh, the Wendigo story in #140, I guess. Which would make it roughly September of 1980.
Thinking I had outgrown comics, I sold off the collection I had, went off to college, met a girl, did a lot of drugs, got thrown out of college, got dumped by the girl, met a different girl and moved in with her, broke up with her, tried to go back to college and got thrown out again, did more drugs and drank a lot … well, I won’t go on with the story of my blighted life in the early 1980s. It would bore you and depress me. Suffice it to say that I crashed and burned pretty hard after a few years of that. I moved to Seattle and cleaned up my life as best I could, and part of that was getting hooked on comics again. That was in 1984, and I remember the book that got me interested — it was The New Teen Titans, because I heard Dick Grayson had quit being Robin or something.
I picked up part one of The Judas Contract and then started hitting comics shops to get back issues. Pretty soon I was branching out to the Bat books, and after another year or so I was back into it as deep as I’d been when I was thirteen. And I’ve been, well, embroiled with comics one way or another ever since.
… but here’s the thing. After I sobered up, replacing the first collection (that I’d gotten rid of bit by bit, for dope money) was just a hobby, a little grail quest I’d pick at. I’d never expected to be able to actually DO it.
But I was looking at the Top 100 Storylines Countdown thing Brian’s got going on and noticing how many of them seem to be placing on the strength of childhood nostalgia. That got me thinking about that first collection of mine, the comics that really hit me hard when I was a kid. Things like my first time seeing THE Batman — “Half an Evil,” with the return of Two-Face.
Or when Jack Kirby showed up on Jimmy Olsen and his in-your-face version of Superman fried my little eyeballs.
Even stuff like the 100-page reprint books DC did in the 70s, or the Lee-Romita Marvel Tales. Reprint books like that are generally regarded as throwaways by collectors compared to first-run stuff, but I was a reader, not a collector, and for me they were like history books — they had a huge impact on me.
Then it hit me. I’d picked up a couple of DC Archives for cheap last week — Justice Society stories from All-Star. I’d wanted them because of the JSA reprints I remembered from those old Justice League Giants.
And I’d also bought the new Thor Essential … even though it reprinted some stuff I already had here in hardcover, because I really liked that Len Wein run from the seventies and now finally I’d get to see the rest of it.
So I’d just added those three books to the library. It dawned on me that when I pick up the next Essential Daredevil, which is to say my pre-ordered Volume 6 that’s supposed to be out in a couple of weeks …
… that’s it. That replaces everything I got rid of, the first time around. When the Daredevil book gets here, it’s all back.
But that’s not the crazy part.
The crazy part is that it’s all in collected editions. Books. Trade paperbacks and hardcovers. All of it.
The JSA hardcovers have the stories I remembered from the old Justice League 100-pagers, and the JLA itself is covered nicely by the Showcase Presents collections I have here. Not to mention the Crisis on Multiple Earths paperbacks. And theme collections like Zatanna’s Search.
Of course, most of it’s in Essentials and Showcases. But I used to have a bunch of other stuff those don’t cover and those comics are all here in trade paperback and hardcover too. The Kirby Jimmy Olsen I have in two volumes … and the Newsboy Legion reprints that were in the back of those comics are here as well.
Of course, classics like “Half an Evil” and Kryptonite Nevermore are in collected editions today. And other fondly-remembered comics like the Gold Key Tarzan.
And my beloved Lee-Romita Spider-Man … hell, that was one of the first comics hardcover collections I bought, back in 1992.
Even the weird short-run shit like Shade the Changing Man, and Stalker, they’re all in the Ditko DC omnibus. Marvel’s Doc Savage — both black-and-white and in color — are here in nice new DC trade editions.
It’s not just the lead features, either. Even the odd little backup strips and reprint things that were in a lot of my seventies comics — I have those here in paperback. The Batman comic with “Half an Evil” also had a Robin solo feature and a newspaper strip reprint. Those stories are both in books on the shelf behind me as well.
I’ve talked about living in the Age of Availability before, and I really do love it … but I never, ever expected that I’d really be able to replace my entire childhood comics collection and have it all neatly shelved in my home library. I remember how hard it used to be for me to even buy comics, let alone keep them — earning the money for them, fighting with Mom over them, my brother swiping them … and now they’re all here. On the bookshelf.
That just blows my mind. I feel weirdly like a racing dog that’s finally caught up to the mechanical rabbit.
So now, I guess I’ll have to think of a new ongoing back-burner comics collector quest. I imagine I’ll come up with something.
See you next week.
Another column in which the Hatcher Effect came into play for me. I ended up getting the Doc Savage books he mentioned, as well as the Ditko Omnibus – which I just happen to be in the middle of right now.
My quests were never that grandiose. i discovered my first comic shop, in college and started buying up stuff I remembered, from about 10 years before, which were mostly owned by friends or relatives. My personal collection was rather small and modest, mostly books I picked up in Whitman 3-packs, back when DC really embraced that. My cousin gave me a big box full of comics, filled with Marv Wolfman era Daredevil, stuff like Black Goliath and The Champions, a bit of Iron Man, some Superman (and Action), some Batman (and Detective), Avengers, early All-New X-Men (Wolverine and the gang), some Charlton, some war books, a few westerns. Another store opened up, closer to campus and I was able to fill in my gaps in the New Teen Titans (I had the first couple, then middle first year, then a couple more, then started getting it consistently from issue #17 onward), the Jon Sable issues I missed when I went off to college (I had 5 of the first 6 issues, then missed about a year and a half or more) and started picking up some of the indie titles I was seeing, like Scout, Nexus, Miracleman, The Maze Agency, The Justice Machine and the post-Crisis DC stuff.
My real collecting searches were either specific storylines, specific artists or writers, and stuff I saw in house ads but never saw in the wild. I collected most of Perez’ work, the John Byrne material on books I liked; stuff like the complete Deathlok, Killraven and Moench & Gulacy Master of Kung Fu. I went after the Strange Tales and Nick Fury solo books, for the SHIELD stories. I got all of the Stalin Thanos stories (that took some reprints, as the Warlock issues were a little harder to find). The one creator, whose entire body of work I went after, was Mike Grell. I loved Warlord, Jon Sable, his Green Arrow and his earlier Legion stuff. So, I hunted for everything, and after finding his brief run on Batman (with the Penguin appearing, for the first time in a while), I had it all….even the back-ups he did in The Phantom Stranger. After that, I hunted down and found all of the 4th World books, all of OMAC and The Eternals. Then, I focused more on those reprint books Greg talks about, then digital. Now, I have everything I ever had as a kid, of adult, with a couple of minor independent exceptions (Scarlet Thunder, from Slave Labor Graphics’ Amaze Ink line of comics , The Dark, from Continuum, and The Swords of Sharpei, from Caliber). Those exceptions and the other three issues of Millennium Publications’ Wild Wild West mini-series are my remaining digital holy grail.