Exclusive incentive virgin variant cover

Comics are great! They have fantastic art, amazing heroes, and despicable villains. Unfortunately, the comic book ecosystem can be a confusing; more so today than ever. Issues with enough variant covers to run the alphabet more than once. Covers that have nothing to do with the books content! Graded books that are sealed up never to be read again. Exclusive issues from events that are super hot until they are not. Key and minor key designations that help us all decide what is important and how to value it. None, at least very little, of that existed when I bought my first comic book. Those very first books I bought came from the most insidious place ever though, The Comic Book Connection*. I mean what kind of evil genius opens a comic book store adjacent to a middle school bus stop!

 * See Dave issue...err post 1      -Editor

There is so much I want to get into about speculators, collectors, enthusiasts, variant covers, grading, etc, but I should start by telling you more about what comic books really mean to me. The initial appeal was definitely Image Comics. Like the music that was coming out of the Pacific Northwest and other previously fringe scenes in the early ‘90’s that were breaking the established music industry’s watered down rock music machine; Image was trying to do the same thing to Marvel and DC’s dominance of the comic book industry. It all made sense to me as a life long Star Wars fan*, I love all rebels! The artistic talent stable that Image brought together and the young artists that it nurtured were incredible. The thing that most astonished me at the time was that these books were coming out at about the same price as Marvel and DC titles, but this wasn’t on cheap blurry newsprint stock…Image was all high quality, yummy, glossy goodness!

* Truly a fanatic. Like watch the trilogy once every three months fanatic. Like how many total kills Princess Leia had fanatic. Like is there enough information available to actual play a game of Sabacc fanatic. Like didn’t have to just look up how to spell Sabacc fanatic. Like AOL screen name Vder (both Vader and reversed Red (Roman numeral) 5 fanatic -Editor

Other honorable mentions for the time are Valiant (Why Shooter?), Lightning (anyone else remember them?), and the undisputed champions of licensed content Dark Horse.

My collecting years were short. Starting in ‘91/92 and ending when I went to college in ‘96. My long box was full. Over the intervening years comics were mostly depressing to me. At one time I went through that box and the most valuable book was a Sonic the Hedgehog 0 I’d picked up on a whim. I hardly remembered the stories from most of those independent series’. So what did I actually have in that box? Why did I not want to get rid of them?

I still don’t know the answer to that, other than it was a box containing 350 choices I’d made. Some of those choices were amazing (Terminator: The Burning Earth), some were head scratching (Tek World), and others started good and fizzled (Pitt…9 issues over 18 months was just not enough). I think mostly buying comics was defiant. Comic books were 100% not cool back then. Dave and I, along with a few others, knew we weren’t cool. We weren’t irredeemably nerdy either. We occupied a middle space where there were no expectations of us to be a certain way. We got to define what we were for good or bad. Collecting comics was part of that definition.

The years have passed. We’ve grown older. We’ve changed. Even though most of those books weren’t worth much to a speculator or comic shop, they were key to me! Not just in the sense that they were cool to look at, some were good to read, others just a memory of what was happening when I bought it. These books are a key to knowing me!

When I went up to Pittsburgh to visit Dave at the end of last year the plan was to hang out and then go waste some time at a casino and see if we’d have any luck. He had a few errands to run and one took us to the massive shop in a mall that never had a chance. I was overwhelmed by the dollar book room there. I spent a decent amount of time looking for my old standbys, Terminator, Star Wars, and this weird comic strip compilation book called Sin. On the way out Dave pointed out an Amazing Spider-man issue that was set in Pittsburgh. I figured it was better to give that $10 to the store than the casino and took the book with me. Honestly, that book sat on my night stand for a few months. then I finally read it…dammit I was hooked. Since then every few months Dave and I get together for a C&C* weekend.

*Comics and Casino. -Editor

All those hours after school in the comic book shop are possible once again. Even with a 4 hour drive between us, the dollar bin dives we do in our respective cities in between visits are amazing when I get to shoot Dave a picture of an Azrael book asking “Have you got this one?” The miles and years no longer exist and there we are again, 15 years old, standing on opposite sides of the bins at Comic Book Connection.

I suppose the take away I want you to have is think of the friend you used to hit the local shop with when you were kids. Maybe you live in different city now. Maybe you are still down the street from each other. Maybe you are still in touch or maybe not. Get in touch with them up and say, “Hey, you remember that book? How fun that used to be? We used to spend all our extra money on books? We should go see if we can find those again!”